The Scrapper
by pineapplepuppies
Summary: Twelve years after the end of The Second Tevarin War, a human scrapper and his adopted tevarin daughter find themselves hunted by pirates.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

It had been 12 years since the end of the Second Tevarin War, and most of those involved had the chance to go back to their normal, boring lives, free to do as they pleased. Wars came and went, as did heroes and memories. Some wished that the memories would unchain themselves, free their owners from their mental prison; alternatively, some wished their memories would come back and lead them to a different time where they knew that those they missed could feel their love and reciprocate it, when they felt like they had purpose.

Purpose, an idea many had lost in the Oberon system after Titania Terraforming had failed and disappeared, leaving people without much, to mine Gann or freeze on Uriel. Many left the system as it had remained unclaimed, and every once in a while, pirates would come by, hoping for a chance to snag some old Titania equipment or slaves or both.

High above Oberon III, some ships remained in decay orbit moving in a ball of debris, the remnants of a battle between a hauler and some pirates. Bits of armor plating and pieces of blast engines and capacitors floated along in escort.

A faint glow aired about the bridge window of one of the ships, a maroon, medium sized salvage ship with a silver trim, about 140 meters in length, inside of which a man sat with an unlit stim in his mouth, staring at a dancing girl on an image panel. The girl was lonely, streaming her show out into the verse from some underground town on Uriel. He bobbed his head to the music and chuckled to himself in shameless agreement at her moves. "Dat dingo," he said as the stim slipped out of his gaping mouth and hit the floor.

The ship's bridge was littered with tools and machine parts, wiring and canisters. Everything here had been recently excavated from the wreckage showing that they had been out here for days, and tags attached to the more intact garbage revealed where they intended to sell them.

The man leaned back and listened to the music coming from the ship's speakers, listened to the girl talk to the stream as his mind wandered elsewhere. He fantasized about his lost loves, his relationships in passing, entertaining the idea of actually sticking around and letting them play out, even though the women were the ones who left _him_. He could barely even finish whatever short trip in that system he was on before proving himself a shallow fool: His boyish good looks matched well his immaturity. He thought of one particular girl and he exhaled as his eyes slowly lowered, the scene of the debris outside the bridge window phasing into the purple blackness of his closed eyelids.

An alarm across the control panel startled him, his adrenaline annoying him with awareness, though his body longed for the dream it was just slipping into.

"Dammit," he whispered. "What now?" Thousands of pieces of recently propelled debris grabbed his attention, and his eyebrows furrowed as he pressed a round red button on his console.

"Karath?" he called, squinting as his eyes focused, searching the mess for signs of life. He called out again and his ears felt anxiously at the empty, lonely static coming from the ship's speakers.

"Yeah!" she responded. The tone in her voice suggested that she was unexpectedly moving faster through space than she wanted to, grasping at a more stable bearing. "I," she blurted. "Just, shut up!"

"What happened?" he ordered, and switched on the ship's startup procedure.

Three hundred meters out, Karath was beginning to slow her rotation with her suit's thrusters just as she was hit by a speeding burnt coupling and lost one. She grunted and gripped at her side, tiny alloy fibers and shards splattering across her helmet from different directions like she was caught in a tornado of steel shavings. Her eyes managed to lock onto a metal storage crate tumbling towards her. While spinning, she timed the approach of the crate with its impact upon her body and gripped onto it with her arms and legs as it slammed into her. She clicked her thrusters on full blast in an attempt at some kind of stabilization, and as her spin slowed she eyed a maroon salvager speeding in her direction. Her comm clicked open but she could barely hear through the sound of the debris raining against her helmet.

"Karath, what did I tell you about cutting into ship engines?"

"That," she said, spinning, "some...parts...fetch...high...prices!"

"And...?" he replied.

She sighed and focused on a large piece of outer-hull she was nearing. At this speed, the impact would be devastating to her suit, so she placed her boots against the crate and positioned it between her and the hull piece. The crate buckled a bit, absorbing the impact, and with her hands and feet against it she yelled and pushed off into the direction of the ship. Within twenty seconds, she made contact with the bridge window and was gripping onto it, staring down through the shiny tint at where she knew the pilot's seat was. Her comm clicked on again, and her head tilted inside her suit as her jaw clenched.

" _And_...?"

"It's dangerous?" she replied.

"Get in here, Karath."

"Yes, Manne."

The alarm and the sharp pressurizing sound of the compression bay preceded a large single panel door sliding over and exposing a meter-and-a-half tall, thoroughly scuffed EVA suit with a missing thruster shuffling into the ship. Karath stepped through the escaping fog of the chamber as a pain shot around her side where the coupling hit her, and she knelt down on the floor, panting.

Sliding her helmet off, she groaned in discomfort as her bluish-silver head-feathers plumed out and twitched, and laid her head in her free hand attempting to ignore the sound of heavy footsteps clumping her way.

"I have a first name, you know," Manne stated.

Karath looked up at him through the vapor shadows, her mauve-colored eyes squinting at the amber signal lamps on the wall behind him. " _Mister_ Manne," she said, nodding a sarcastic smile at him before burying her face back into her hand.

Manne chuckled. "Little tevarin," he said. "Did you come back with anything?"

Her eyes brightened and the corners of her mouth raised. "Maybe."

At 11 years old she was proving more and more capable by the day. So much so that Manne was starting to let her go off on her own to scrap-search. Over the past 9 years, he'd tried to teach her just about everything he knew, about flying, scrapping, building circuitry, using weapons, and she was soaking it all up like a sponge. Her physical tevarin abilities had been shining, too: Her agility and coordination, combined with her youthful vigor and the opportunities he was giving her to exercise them, were starting to really impress him. She still had much to learn, things usually gained by experience, things like patience and caution. As for Manne, well, even a 30 year old space-faring veteran still had a lot to learn.

"Here." She reached into the large storage unit mounted on her back. "I had my eyes on more before, well, you know." She pulled out an intact maneuvering thruster—alone it wouldn't fetch much, but any more than a few would call for a decent pack price.

"Not bad, Karath," Manne approved. "How are your ribs?"

Karath pressed on her side and flinched. "Bruised, maybe?"

"Okay well give me your suit and—"

"I can fix it! Can I?" she interrupted anxiously.

"No, no, you relax. I'll fix it, and—"

"And?"—she said, smiling in anticipation—" _and_?"

"Well—"

" _Please_?" she pleaded, in the long, drawn out syllable kids use that can break down energy fields.

"Well," he continued, "sure, a story, if you'll hurry up and get out of the suit."

She always looked forward to hearing his stories; he had a million of them. The Second Tevarin War stories, though, she was interested in the most. She'd been with Manne ever since she could remember, and he'd never told her who her parents were. When she finally found the courage to ask about them, he seemed to go to a dark place, always giving her excuses. "It's complicated," he'd say, or "I'll tell you when you're old enough." She stopped asking about them eventually. Instead, she would listen intently to the stories he would tell, putting together his past, piece by piece, waiting for the moment he'd slip up and give her something she could use to unlock her own. Sometimes, though, as he was all she'd ever known, listening to his stories gave her a measure of peace in the big dark; his tired old voice and the cadence he'd developed through telling so many stories gave her a real feeling of home, a warm sense of belonging in the spacial infinity of the cold, dark universe.

She watched as Manne repaired the broken thruster port on her EVA suit. She'd watched him do things like this so many times that she knew exactly what he'd do and in what order. She looked at the tool before he reached for it, knew how many times he'd have to screw to get bolts in, what order he repaired her suit in, she even predicted when he'd take a small break to smoke a stim while he contemplated his next move. Ever since she was 4 years old she watched him scrap around the systems. There was something zen in it all, therapeutic.

"Which one are you going to tell today, Manne?" she inquired.

"I have a first name, you know," he replied.

She rolled her eyes and looked away. "Which story are you going to tell, _Ehhkosteeen_." She hated saying his first name: Three syllables was a novel compared to _Manne_. He knew she hated saying it, so he always asked her to.

"What is it?" he persisted.

"Ehhhckwohhshmeeen!" she mocked, and hearing it tickled him so much that he stopped what he was doing to chuckle for a full minute while Karath tried to hold in her laugh, inevitably failing and giggling until her side gave her great pain. She favored her ribs, alternating grimaces and smiles between exhales.

Manne composed himself and continued his work. After a while he glanced up at Karath and then quickly back down at the suit before she noticed. "I'm going to tell you about my first experience with the tevarin."

He never told her _this_ story, she thought. She got comfortable and looked over to him in anticipation.

"I had just turned 11 when whispers of a second war with the tevarin reached my home planet of Rytif, in the Bremen system, on the lips of settlers and transplants. When we got the official word through the relays I remember an immediate change of attitude falling over the people, like we all knew we were going to be involved, somehow. We knew that reclamation of the Elysium system would be the endgame of the tevarin, and being 4 jump-points away from there put Bremen Mills in strategic territory for the UEE.

"Rations. We grew a hell of a lot of food for the UEE, and in my little corner of the universe just outside Stalford, I was just old enough to help out on the farms.

"It was hard work, even though there were a lot of us. The fields were huge and the machines they were making then were getting pretty advanced. I worked mostly with a girl from school who was the same age as I was, and we'd take turns piloting and maintaining the machines. It went on like that for a while, for years..." Manne looked out the bridge window at the darkening horizon of Oberon III. He stopped and stared for a while before Karath audibly cleared her throat to snap him out of it.

"Sorry," he said. "It went on for years, and by the time we were 15 we were deeply in love."

"Ew," Karath spat, disgusted. "Can't you keep that out of the story, I _thought_ this was a story about the tevarin."

"This _is_ about the tevarin," he replied. "One in particular, but it's also about Lin."

"Who's Lin?" she inquired.

"Can I just tell the story, Karath? Can I?"

Karath audibly exhaled her impatience and turned away. "Fine," she said.

" _Gods_ ," he exclaimed. "Lin was her name." He went back to working on the suit. "She was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. She was witty, creative, strong. She was _perfect_ , which obviously meant that we were perfect, for each other, because I was perfect, too. I was a star athlete and video game champion, the best of my age!"

Karath glanced at his belly. "Sure, ok."

"I was!" he snapped, "and I swept her off her feet, twice. Well the first time was an accident, I was just learning how to pilot one of the harvesters and almost sliced her legs off. She hated me for a full year after that. But we were close, we _grew_ close. One night, towards the end of the harvest, we sat on our gatherer and stared up at the stars through the blood-orange glow of the horizon.

"'Ecky,' she said, 'what do you think it's like, being out there fighting a war?'

"'Well I'm sure it sucks,' I told her.

"'Of course, but, we're here, making food and profit, feeding an army that might one day just all be dead.'"

" _So romantic_ ," mocked Karath. "Where are you even going with this?"

Manne dropped his hands to his side and looked up at her disapprovingly. "Karath," he said. "I will pluck out your feathers and deep fry you. I'm _getting_ to it, there's a point to every story, but you have to wait."

"I _am_ waiting," she replied. "For you to get to the good part!"

She laughed and he chuckled in head-shaking frustration. "You are unreal," he said.

"So Lin," he continued. "Lin went on about the horrors of war, and her concern of the war reaching Bremen's doorstep.

"'What if they came to Bremen, surely they'd come for Rytif,' she said. 'Surely, they'd come for Stalford.' I remember her looking at me with genuine fear in her eyes, a fear she always kept from me, until that day. She opened up to me, and I, completely lost in the look of her utter honesty, knew at that moment that I loved her.

"I held her hand and pulled her close, we kissed and I hugged her even closer. 'Then I would die protecting you,' I told her. I don't know if she believed me, but I meant it." Manne inhaled shakily, and pursed his lips, blinking away a tear. "I sure as hell meant it at the time."

"Seven years," he continued. "Seven short years—short for me, the time I spent with Lin could have lasted for an eternity and it still wouldn't have been enough.

"The war was ending, we were winning, and the tevarin had their backs against the wall. Your people are strong, Karath. They're strong, capable, if they were space-faring for a few hundred years earlier, they might have taken us out. I might've been your slave, Karath." Manne chuckled once, until he noticed a devilish grin across Karath's face. "But they didn't, and I'm not."

"Not yet, _slave,_ " she joked.

The notion put a bad taste into his mouth, so he puffed away at his stim a few times and continued the story. "She ended up being right. Some rogue tevarin found their way to Bremen, to Rytif, to attack and take what they could. I stood up to fight in Stalford, I had to. I was old enough, capable enough, I fought for my people there, people who couldn't fight for themselves, peaceful farmers and mothers, children, people who needed someone like me to fight for them.

"Before I left, Lin begged me not to go. 'I can't lose you,' I remember her saying. 'If you go you'll never return to me, I can't let you leave.' I assured her I would make it, I assured her that her and her family were safe, on the outskirts. They had bunkers, hideouts, and it seemed like all the action was happening towards the city, where Arcturus Koerner and his men held steadfast against the raids of the tevarin pirates.

"The fighting only lasted a week, and before long, the city had returned to its calm, and I returned home. I returned—" He stopped working on the suit and became distant.

"You returned?" Karath reminded him.

He looked at her. "She was dead. I returned and she was dead. Her family, slaughtered. During the fighting there was a pirate who eluded us, he would use his sword to slice a 't' somewhere on his victims, on their backs, their faces, it was like his calling card. I guess he and his boys passed through town on their way out and off the planet, and Lin's family weren't the only ones." He looked down at the suit, his hands still and unmoving. "I got back to find her and her family slaughtered like livestock, the letter 't' sliced into their backs. When I turned her stiff body around and held her cold face upon mine, something inside of me died.

"Governor Koerner awarded me with citizenship, I got some property and a nice house, some recognition, but I couldn't stay long. I disappeared and have been scrapping remnants of ships and battles around the galaxy ever since. I could never really get close to anyone after that. You're kind of the only family or friend I have left now." He snapped back to reality and resumed repair of Karath's suit.

She, however, wasn't done with the story. She laid there, staring holes into him, gritting her teeth. Finally, she sat up, and he looked up from the suit to angry eyes.

"When," she said, "when are you going to tell me about my parents?"

"K-Karath," he stuttered.

"No!" she snapped. "When? If? I deserve to know. You dangle these stories in front of me, are they even _real?_ You've been scrapping around the galaxy ever since? What about when you met me, _how_ you met me, _where_ you found me? When am I going to know?"

"Karath," he said. "I've never lied to you."

"So tell me!" she replied.

"I just told you one of my most intimate stories, I opened up to you just then! Doesn't that account for anything?"

"I'm opening up to you right _now_ ," she replied. "I need to know who I am, where I came from, where you _stole_ me from. I deserve to know, I need to figure out who I am, _Ecklestein_!"

Her eyes, the look she gave him reminded him of something he'd seen a long time ago, the forceful stare of an honest moment. That _was_ who she was, she was showing it right then and there: She was growing up.

"Maybe it's me, who isn't ready to tell you," he said in melancholy. She broke her stare and looked down at the suit, her tensed shoulders relaxing a bit. He had always seemed so strong to her, indestructible. He had always given her everything, taught her so much; as a kid, it's hard to realize that your guardians can be vulnerable too.

"I'll tell you when you turn 12, Karath, I promise."

Her eyes slowly lit up towards him as she fully realized what he was saying to her. "But Manne, that's in a few—"

Her words were cut off by the ship's alarm, and the light in the room flashed bright red. Manne sprinted over to the control panel to examine the screens.

"No," he whispered, and glanced up through the bridge window just in time to see flashes of explosions among the orbiting debris field. He turned to Karath and straightened up, inhaling.

"Pirates."


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

"Pirates?" Karath questioned.

"Yeah," Manne replied. "Get ready."

"Ready? Ready how?"

Manne was already in the pilot seat, starting the ship up.

"Ready _how?_ " she repeated.

He spoke quickly, clearly. "Suit up, get to the gun crate and grab our energy pistols."

"Ok, suit up, get the pistols," she repeated, "suit up, get the pistols." She started to breathe heavily; her hands began to shake. These encounters were rare, and even though they did a lot of target practice, the real thing always tugged at her fear. It always felt like time moved faster than she wanted it to, like she was constantly playing catch up. She was snapping in the last buttons of her suit when she got to the gun crate. As she came running onto the bridge, Manne yelled back at her to remind her to check the guns. "Damn," she whispered. "Okay."

"Toss one to me and holster the other," he said. "Safety on, got it?"

"Here!" she said tossing it to him; he swiftly caught and holstered it in one move. She holstered her own and stood there, staring at the ships on the tracking screen, forgetting to breathe.

"Karath! Get to the turret and strap in so we can go!" he ordered.

"Oh! G-got it." she answered. When she got to the turret muscle memory took over and she strapped in and started the gun up. Immediately, she spun and searched the space around her, ready to fire, with her attention on her computer, her eyes out in space: She manned the turret like it was second nature. "Ready!" she stated.

The salvager immediately took off through the debris, pushing shards in every direction. Manne weaved in and around among the wreckage, making it harder for the pirates to track him.

"There are 2 of them, Kay, got it?"

"Got it." Their ship sported customizations from a shady space port to use six TR5 engines and a manned turret on its underside. They could get up to around five hundred meters per second, depending on their load, but they'd been scrapping in orbit for days, and were about to call it quits and head to Vega to cash in, so they weren't outrunning anybody, especially two medium fighters, pirate-customized.

"Just keep an eye on 'em, Kay."

"Got it."

"I'm going to find a path and decouple, don't _fire_ yet."

Fire, she thought. She'd fired _at_ pirates, but never hit one. They both knew she never killed anybody, but Manne wasn't going to talk about it now; she needed to focus. She'd need support after her first—there was no avoiding it—and in a way, he felt sorry for her: Maturing definitely wasn't easy for humans, and there was no way it was easy for tevarin, either.

"Talk to me, Kay."

"They're having trouble getting through the debris. One of them disengaged and is following us outside of the wreckage," she reported.

"Well we're about to run out of wreckage here soon, so I need you to get ready." Her hands were shaking, fingers twitching, her breathing stayed accelerated like she was sprinting. "After I decouple," Manne warned, "aim at the one that disengaged and fire, keep firing, and remember to lead him, Kay."

"Okay," she replied.

He decoupled and spun the ship around as the missile lock warning sounded. He glanced over at one of the screens to see a heatseeker coming in fast. "You ready, Kay?" he yelled.

"Ready!" Her hands shook as she tried as hard as she could to keep the ship in her crosshair. Manne released the flare and broke just in time for the bogey missile to switch direction, and as the tailing ship approached he locked onto him with a missile and fired, shooting his gatling simultaneously. It turned to evade and exposed a symbol on its side just before its shields flashed from the missile impact, and he was knocked off course towards a cloud of space debris and collided with everything in it. Karath was locked onto the remaining pirate but was hesitating.

"Karath, fire," Manne yelled. "Squeeze the trigger!"

Karath was shivering and hyperventilating: Fear had taken her over, now. She froze as bright flashes came out from the ship. She stayed leading him, crosshair dead on him, but couldn't fire. As the blasts from the ship sprayed right across her turret, exploding against the shields, almost blinding her, she screamed and finally squeezed the trigger.

When the flash dimmed, her eyes focused on the pirate, her hands still tight over the trigger, crosshair still right on top of him. She was yelling out her fears, her adrenaline, and as the ship's shields went down the first thing to go was its engine, and it spun off course into a large, abandoned freighter and exploded.

She kept firing and screaming as Manne spoke over the comm. "Karath, stop. Let go of the trigger." She fired until the blaster overheated. Manne shut the gun off remotely and ran over to her. He unlocked the turret and as it came up through the floor, he could see that Karath was still hyperventilating, eyes wide open and staring into nothingness, hands pasted over the control stick. Manne put his hand on her head, his eyes into her line of sight and whispered her name, over and over, waiting for her eyes to focus in on him. She finally came to and slowed her breathing.

"I killed him," she said.

"You _saved_ us," he replied. "You saved us, Kay."

He slowly pried her fingers off the controls, and led her out of the turret chair to sit down with her on the cold steel floor. He hugged her head against his chest, and before long, she began convulsing, shoulders shaking, crying into his suit and dropping tears into his ammo pockets.

"It's okay," he reassured her. "It's okay, you did well." He held her tight, and she held him harder than she ever had, and couldn't notice that he, too, had tears sliding down his cheeks. Some naive part of him hoped she'd never have to do what she just did, but he knew because he lived it, that eventually kids have to grow up.

They sat there until she calmed down, and he led her to bed. She looked around and protested.

"I don't want to go to sleep," she said. "Can I just hang out on the bridge with you?"

"Of course you can. I think it's about time we head back to Vega, don't you?"

She nodded in agreement. "Absolutely," she said. He tried to help her out of bed, but she found her legs on her own. She was strong, adapting. She knew that doing something as simple as standing up and putting one foot in front of the other kept time moving forward, kept your mind from falling back and getting stuck in the mud of the past. She wasn't the kind to back down: Maybe it was a tevarin instinct.

They got to the bridge and she sat in the co-pilot seat. Manne did some hull testing and prepped the ship for travel. They were to hop over to the Oberon-Vega jump-point and come out the other side not too far from Selene, a populated planet where they could get great prices for their findings. It was also a good place to lay low for a while after some maintenance.

When they got going, Karath's attention would drift off into the passing stars, and fear and anxiety would start to creep back and she'd focus on the ship's controls, needlessly doing scans or ship tests. She tried her best to keep busy, never noticing Manne keeping her in the corner of his own eye, partly to monitor her behavior, but mostly so that she couldn't see him falter. He was stone-faced on the outside, but on the inside he was falling apart. He'd had this darkness looming over him ever since the ship he shot down revealed the pirate mark on its side: A curved sword, pointing downward, forming a lowercase "t".

They warped to the jump-point, and as they approached it he slowed the ship down. Karath turned, confused. She finally figured out that something was wrong, that Manne was hiding something.

I guess it's time, he thought. It's time for Karath to know where she comes from, who she comes from. It was time for her journey to begin, and a piece of him hoped that she wouldn't let revenge poison her or nest inside of her only to claw its way out, slowly destroying her from her singed interior. Finally, it was time to stop keeping her in the dark.

"I'm going to tell you how I found you," he said.

Karath didn't believe it. How could this be, she thought. Even though this was what she had always wanted, she questioned herself if she was ready. She knew this was coming eventually, but even expected events had a way of sneaking up on her. Ready or not, her life was about to undergo a drastic change.

"Okay."

"Are you ready?" he asked.

She nodded.

"When the war ended, I couldn't stay in Bremen: Too many memories. So I left my home to scrap the stars. Over the next 3 years I worked in a half a dozen systems, and I met a lot of people: shady people; good people; pirates. I did all sorts of work—some I'm really not proud of—but most of my work involved scrapping around, repairing things I found, selling them at space stations, cities, anywhere I could.

"The pirates paid the most for a lot of items: They had money and were constantly building ships. I've been to Ruin Station in Pyro, The Coil in Odin, I've seen the Olympus in Nul, Tohil Belt Alpha. I worked with and for all different types, but most of the time the work, the work was great to me. I spent 3 years floating around the stars, repairing things, building things, always alone until I found you."

Karath's feathers stood on end at the statement. She was close, she was excited, scared; she had no idea what she was going to find out. She trusted Manne, she cared for him; he'd always been there for her ever since she could remember. He taught her everything she knew about anything, cared for her like a daughter. In some twisted way, she saw him as her father, but there was so much she didn't know about him. How could she possibly know who he was before she knew him? How could she trust anything he said about his past life, his past dealings and works with pirates and lowlives and scum of the galaxy? She listened, frightened, questions flooding her mind in the anticipation of his confessions.

"I met some good people too, though, Kay. The folks on Delamar, in Nyx, were strict about their people's security. Though I've seen a lot of bad in the galaxy, I know that there are good folks everywhere, if you look hard enough.

"After the war, some of your kind went back to live on Kabal III, an ancient tevarin planet abandoned after the First Tevarin War. Many of your people turned to piracy back then, and those, like your mother, who were just looking for peace, fled to Kabal to search for it.

"The tevarin were broken at that point, didn't have too much, which meant that they didn't have a whole lot to protect themselves from pirates, either. In the time I was there, I'd seen a few raids, and it was a shame, I really felt sorry for them."

Karath glanced out the bridge window at the stars and wondered at the empathy Manne seemed to feel about the different races in the galaxy. It didn't seem to matter who you were, he always found a way to feel for those who fell on tough times, even the _tevarin_. It's how he taught her to be too: Be smart to figure out the real story, then have a heart for those who had lost hope.

"I had heard of a raid on Kabal III, when I was out there scrappin' up some tevarin artifacts—ancient equipment left after the First War. They were slave traders, scooping up tevarin and taking advantage of the low presence of security in the system. I thought maybe I could find some things left behind among the smoke and rubble, but I couldn't have guessed that I'd end up finding survivors.

"When I got to the camp, I found your mother, huddled around a bundle of blankets, barely alive. She stirred when I approached her, and those tired, forest green eyes I saw when she looked up at me, well, she didn't need to say anything. I was changed at that moment, Kay. She unraveled the blankets to show me a small tevarin child, a 3 year old with bluish-silver feathers on her head, purple eyes, starving, looking up at me in fear. The mother told me her own name: Thela."

"Thela," Karath repeated.

"That's right, Thela was your mother."

"Was?" she replied.

"Thela had protected you, kept you out of harm's way, kept you fed and safe, for 3 years before ending up on Kabal. She told me your name, but she was in a bad way at that point: Nothing could have saved her." He looked solemnly over to her, eyebrows furrowed. "I'm sorry."

Karath was concentrating on remembering her mother's name, trying to imagine who she was, what she'd gone through to keep her safe as she was a defenseless child. She wondered about her father. "Was she able to tell you who my father was, what his name was? What happened to him?" she inquired.

"I don't know," he slowly and sorrowfully replied. "She never had a chance to mention him."

Manne paused for a while to let the silence comfort and support Karath as she tried to soak it all in, as she tried to remember the name he had given her and imagine who her parents were, now that she could fill in the blankness of her past with some color. After a while, he stared out into the stars and took a deep breath. "She did tell me something else, though, Karath."

She snapped out of her mind and looked up at him, prepared to hear more.

"Your mother said she was attacked by a band of pirates led by a tevarin, an ex-pilot who had abandoned his people towards the end of the war."

"Were there such tevarin?" Karath asked. "I thought they were honorable, that the Rijoran way held them to standards." She remembered some of the exhausting stories Manne told her, history lessons she managed to keep awake for.

"There will always be a few in any group, tevarin included, that, for better or for worse, abandon their own," he said. "This particular one didn't want to follow Corath'Thal to his death, didn't want to be immortalized in the pages of tevarin history, and I guess I can't blame him."

Karath became pensive, now theorizing about her own people. She thought that regardless of race, people who supported and cared for each other did exactly that, and she couldn't understand how some could abandon each other, leave each other at the end when they may need each other the most. She'd learned words like selfishness, hatred, and the like, and knew what they meant, but to know the definitions and truly understand the people those words described were two different stories.

"Kay," Manne whispered. She snapped out of it again and took a breath, looking up at him. It was by far, the heaviest day of her entire life, and she wasn't sure exactly how much more she could take. "What is it?" she replied.

"Your mother told me something about the pirates who attacked them, specifically, about how to identify them."

A dark anticipation started to wash over her as the feathers on her neck stood out; it was like her body knew what was coming before she did, like her soul was preparing her for a truth that would change her life and set her on an unfaltering course down a path she always knew she was going to take—that she had to take—but just knew not when.

"All the ships that the pirates flew sported an emblem, a big one, and easily recognizable: it's a curved tevarin short-blade, one with the hilt of the handle forming the cross of a lowercase 't'."

Her breathing became short, her eyes slowly widened. "No," she whispered.

"It was the image I caught a glimpse of today, on the side of the ship I shot down." He looked over at her and watched as Karath's eyes slowly made their way to the bridge window; her jaw, her shoulders, her hands, her feet, all tensed up. Manne closed his eyes and regretted ever telling her anything, though he knew it had to be done. By not telling her the story of her past, he inadvertently built an unlit torch inside of her, one that when lit, when he exposed the truth, would explode like a firecracker in her heart, leaving the door to her soul scorched. Everything he ever taught her would now become tools for her to use to achieve revenge. He had set her on a course that she couldn't turn back from, that she _wouldn't_ turn back from, and now he wondered what part it was that he would play in the redemption.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

As Manne and Karath approached the Oberon-Vega jump-point, it seemed the weight of the universe was on them both. Neither had said anything, for the recent events had left them physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. Manne quietly focused on the preparations that needed to be made for the jump, as he had done countless times before, and though his attention leaned towards ship navigation, inside his mind, he was cycling through the destinations of where this new road was going to take he and Karath, both.

He finally resigned to the idea that this had to happen eventually. How could he keep the truth away from Karath, forever? It wouldn't be fair, he thought, he'd never be able to forgive himself. What right did he have to keep a piece of who she was away from her? She didn't belong to him, she was her own person, and as such, deserved this fragment of her being, regardless of what it would turn her into. The innocence in which he kept her shrouded was more for himself than it was for her, and it wasn't until he uncovered the truth to her, that he was able to see that himself.

Across the universe, in the co-pilot's chair, Karath's swirling mass of thoughts took a different shape and vector.

Growing up, Manne used to tell her fairy tales from the ancient cultures of the distant human homeworld of Earth. The morals, the lessons, the takeaways of these stories had infiltrated her, leaving traces of human thought littered around her mind. She was also a tevarin, and as such, she had a stern disposition towards the upholding of honor. To them, a long life was second to an honorable one, however short. They had lived that way on their planet for thousands of years before becoming space-faring, and it often showed itself as an innate quality. She was torn, the stability of her grasp on reality, disrupted. Her choices were obvious: Revenge or nothing. Her past would haunt her forever if she did nothing, but she was afraid of whom, or what, she'd become if she sought revenge. The warnings of ancient human voices rang loud in her mind, and she wondered if raw desire would ring louder, and if so, would she truly achieve freedom, or lose it?

They navigated the jump-point and came out in relief, for no matter how many of them one navigated, they never got any safer, the consequences were never less grave.

It wasn't long before they were entering the atmosphere of Vega III.

" _Selene_ ," Manne said. "Been a while."

"Looks like there are more buildings than I remember," Karath replied. They were in a bigger city now than they were the last time they visited, but Manne didn't mention it: He was happy that she was taking interest in that kind of conversation. It showed some kind of return—or an attempt at least—to stability. Willingness and time can be an effective pair.

They docked down in a quiet zone right outside the inner city, along the water, where it was cheaper to park but close enough to blend into the population. Before he shut down the ship, Manne put in his orders for repairs and replacement batteries, rations, the like, and sighed awkward relief to be back on soil. It always felt weird to him at first, but growing up on it, he'd admit to himself that he lied whenever he told an ex-girlfriend that his soul belonged in the dark frontier of space: He actually loved being on the ground.

Eager workers in the hangar eyed them up and down, a few more nosey ones taking too much interest in their ship and their identities. Some offered their services and, more importantly, their machines, to help unload their treasures. They'd seen many scrappers come this way, and knew that an encounter with a great scrapper was rare but lucrative.

It wasn't long before they were on the road in a cargo truck, making their rounds about the buyers in the city. Manne followed his mobi and was busy dealing with the hectic ant lines that were the deep urban traffic lanes.

Karath sat passenger, with her head resting on her hand, staring out at the busy of the city; she started to wonder at the world she saw. Every single one of these souls had a story: a beginning, an ending; ups and downs; she saw them all and wondered how the web of their lives shook when they died, or someone close to them did, or something tragic happened to them. She stared at people's faces and asked herself what they did behind closed doors and if anybody would ever find out, if someone she'd just seen knew someone who had something to do with her mother's death, with _anyone's_ death.

She was beginning to make up her mind, then, that no matter where this "T" was, this tevarin who'd decided that her mother's life was worth nothing, that if she came across him, she'd make him regret—regret, and remember, for maybe it was in the terror of our memories, that when we're forced to think about the wrongs we've made, we are then forced to live through the effects of those actions, that we're put on the opposite end to receive an imposition of free will, that which we had given out so freely.

There were so many people in this system that if you had something, you could find someone who wanted it, and if you wanted something, you could find someone who had it. Manne and Karath managed to empty out half their truck by the end of the day, and headed back to the dock to turn in for the night at a nearby hotel.

The two were so busy that there wasn't time for many words between them. Manne took it as Karath's way of trying to move on from what she'd learned, as he knew the value of a hard-earned workday in regards to helping one cope with a recent life event. He remembered when he dealt with the stress of accepting the unforeseen, that hard work and time mixed to cement the unstable rocky turmoil that he used to call his life.

For Karath it was different. By the time she laid her head down on that silk-laden pillow, in that lush, two bedroom suite—the kind Manne liked to stay in the first day back on dirt from a successful scrap run—she had already decided her purpose. The rush of revenge had come and gone, and what remained was quiet determination.

She laid there, wide awake, listening to the muffled sounds of the street and Manne's grumblings next door, and stared up at the ceiling blind to the faint light shining in her eyes through the curtained window. She was emotionless, still, like the frame of a clock, the cogs ticking away, counting down to some inevitability. Part of her wished she could turn back time, when she felt like the only cares she had were what scrap she was going to find or repair next, when she learned from Manne how to pilot ships, and listened to his stories. The mystery of her identity was always in the back of her mind, but they might as well have been far off into the galaxy, for she lived for the day to day. There was never a time where she worried too much about what the future might bring her, no malevolence, just a shining star of curiosity, and a hopeful yearning for some sense of family.

Things were more complicated now. She stared up at the ceiling for hours driving herself mad, wondering at who this tevarin was, how she was going to find him, and in part wishing to go back to simpler times.

She frustratingly exhaled and climbed out of bed. Fresh, non-recycled air might clear the head, she thought, and with that she suited up and slipped out of the hotel, unnoticed, sliding through the shadows like Manne had taught her to.

A few star systems away, on the 5th planet of Nul, Ashana, figures moved through shadow not unlike Karath. Their moves were more sinister, though, and the darkness seemed to swirl around them as they passed, disturbing the constant dust and smoke that pervaded the outdoor hallways of Olympus, the battlecruiser city. This smoke and dust knew the secrets of all those who lived or conducted business here, no matter how much time they spent living out of sight. It shifted aside as silhouettes waded past them, and filled in behind as soon as they did and patted their backs.

It curiously followed a man who limped down shaded corridors, past tweaked out Maze addicts and SLAMjunkies, until he got to a secluded metal wall in the lower corners of the city. He leaned against it for a moment watching all ways around him before knocking against it: Two hard, three quick, and one final hard one to open it up. Smoke filled the corridor, and when it dissipated, he and the door were gone.

Inside, he stood half in shadow, half in a blood-red pool of glow, as he nodded up at a security gun camera mounted up above the door, aiming directly at his chest and cocked, ready to fire. The man flinched underneath his coat as the gun's safety clicked on, and he let out a sigh of slight relief as the doors in front of him slid apart, unveiling a long dark passageway leading deeper into one of Olympus' sub-chambers. He stepped quickly out of the security room, for he knew that each time he went through it was a blessing: A shady pirate's closest friends can be his quickest enemies.

It was a type of dwelling rarely seen in Olympus—they were expensive to maintain; more importantly, they were commissioned to be under the radar, and only long-standing pirate gangs would even have a chance to hole themselves up so deep in the Olympus.

This particular one was run by a gang specializing in slavery. From deep asteroid miners to the comfort girls in casinos, it seemed that they had slaves from almost every walk of life.

This casino also served as the base of operations for the gang in this sector of the galaxy. Inside, dim lights stalked gamblers from above and caressed scant-clad arm-candy of all races hugged up against them, laughing at every joke, and lending words of support when they lost their money on the table, hoping to get what money they had left in their pockets so they could spend it on more Neon.

Towards the back of the casino, armed tevarins guarded a red velvet carpet-lain stairwell. The limping man moved towards them and paused when they sneered back.

"I got a message for the boss," he yelled over the music.

The guard on the right lowered his energy rifle and stuck out his hand, smiling. "You know the rules, Peg," he gloated.

" _I got a message for the boss_ ," he stressed. "I ain't borrowin' credits."

"And _I_ got an empty hand and a rifle, which one you rather deal with?"

Peg mumbled under his breath and reached into his coat, pulling out a newer model electronic Stim and an array of different flavored liquids, handing them over. The guards approved of his payment and chuckled, admiring the e-Stim as he passed, debating who would try it first.

Peg limped his way up the stairs and paused in front of a pair of large double doors covered in red velvet to take a deep breath. A massive, golden emblem depicting a curved, downward-pointing knife, reading as the letter "t", was mounted in the center of the doors. Peg gripped the point of the golden knife on the right door, twisting it like a handle, and limped inside.

The suite was large, pentagonal, complete with lounge couches lined with animal fur, and a bar with unmarked, crystal vases. Decorated along the room's five walls were loaded guns ranging from collector handguns to high-end energy rifles, mounted against framed wallscreens which depicted various charming sceneries from planet surfaces across the galaxy. Peg stood in awe of the room: To witness it from the inside was rare, and everytime he did it was more impressive than the last. His eyes wandered lustfully around the room before finally realizing its eerie stillness.

In all his admiration, his eyes had passed over a tevarin who stood still to his left, large, engraved high-carbon blade in hand, menacingly staring down his jade-black beak at him. When his eyes passed over him again, he fully realized what was in front of him, and he shrieked and stepped back in the opposite direction, stumbling.

"Uh, uh boss," he stuttered. "I mean Tee, how are y—"

"I could have sliced your head off—" he paused. "You, what's your name again?"

"It's Peg, sir, I mean Tee."

"Peg," he said, squinting. "Peg, don't you owe me money?"

"Yes, Tee," Peg waved his hands in front of him in defense and stood up, stammering. "I, I've been making payments, you can ask any one of your bursars!"

Tee sheathed his sword and walked towards his desk. "And what makes you think that my bursars are so truthful?"

"Well, I...I guess I'm not sure, Tee."

Tee moved to sit at a large, burgundy, cushioned table, and pulled one of its drawers out. He set a gas-filled vial in one of the indentations on the table's leather surface. Peg gazed at it with yearning before he noticed Tee staring at him expectantly.

"You have a message for me, Peg?"

"Yes! Yes, sir, I mean Tee, we've just received a signal from the info relay." He paused, waiting for Tee to respond before realizing that Tee was losing his patience waiting for him to finish his message.

"Sorry, the signal came from the Oberon search party."

Tee took a deep breath at this, and leaned back in his chair waiting for the bad news: When ships and pilots went dark the reason was never favorable.

"It seems," Peg continued, "that they tried to pick up a scavenger ship that had been scrapping in orbit for days. They stalked them, but failed to subdue them."

"Where are they now?" Tee replied shortly with a cold stare and twitched his ebony head-feathers.

"O-one of the party decided to hang back from the assault and tail 'em, instead. He said after taking out the others they sped off to the Vega jump-point." Peg spoke quickly and nervously, as he could tell that the combination of the bad news and the time it was taking him to get to the final point of the message was making Tee furious—his breathing accelerated and his hands were starting to ball up into fists.

"They've been tracked to a large city on Selene, and we've been contacted by a dock worker. He expects payment, sir."

"He'll get it," Tee snapped. "What about our brothers on Selene?"

"They know where they are, Tee."

Tee smirked behind his beak and looked up at an electric shotgun mounted on a wallscreen which showed a full day footage loop, from sunrise to sunset, of a picturesque landscape on Kabal III. His smirk waned and he looked back at Peg.

"Got any info on 'em?" he asked.

"We've been cross-checking their ship id with our records, Tee," Peg replied.

"Well let me know when you find something."

Peg nodded agreeably, and spun around on his prosthetic, hastily making for the exit. He'd seen folks enter Tee's office never to be seen again, so he didn't want to be in it any longer than he absolutely had to.

"Peg."

He froze and swallowed audibly, shaking as he cleared his throat and turned around.

Tee now had the SLAM vial in his hand and was twirling it through his fingers. "Do you think I want someone working for me who can't even notice when there's someone standing next to them, ready to chop their head off with a large, engraved, high-carbon blade?"

Peg knew the answer. "N-no, sir, I mean Tee, no Tee, I-it was an accident." Peg had gambled his leg away but was now gambling with his life the longer he stayed in this room.

"You think about that Peg," he said, nodding him out of the room. Peg didn't need to be told twice, and swung the door open almost tripping on his way out. As he made his way down the first few steps he thought about the look Tee gave him, thought about how Tee could have taken him out right then and there, but hesitated, and for some divine reason let a disappointment stumble out of his office with all his fingers and toes. Before the door closed shut behind him, the sounds of the SLAM vial breaking and sharp inhaling made his heart skip a beat, sent shivers down his spine.

Back on Selene, the faint blue glow of dawn was just beginning to peek over the horizon, searching the dead streets of the slumbering city. The light of the sky penetrated into Manne's bedroom, caressing Manne's eyelids, convincing them to open. His eyes slowly felt around the dark room, over the tiny blinking charging lights of various electronics, and he retracted back to the soft-spun silk of his expensive hotel pillow. Still dark enough to go back to sleep, he thought.

As he was fading, a sharp click bounced around the living room of the suite, and the quiet stillness of the early morning gave way to the unmistakable sound of muffled breathing. Manne's eyes sprung wide open, and as quietly as he could he slid out of the bed, naked as a newborn, and wobbled towards the bathroom like it were his first steps.

The bedroom door burst open, sending wood splinters across the bed, and two dark-dressed humans stepped in, firing at the sheets and pillows, blowing them up into a cloud of feathers and fabric. Two quick blasts from their side struck them fast as lightning, knocking both of their heads into their shoulders, and they collapsed down to the ground to lay lifeless with a plume of grey smoke rising up through the holes in their hats.

Manne stood in the bathroom doorway with light rays from his window reflecting off the energy pistol in his hands, illuminating his eyes and pendulating genitals. Without covering up, he shamelessly shuffled into the living room, pointing his pistol at the open door of his suite. He peeked out into the hallway before closing the door, and stood a moment with his free hand on the door knob, breathing the slow extended breaths of a thinking man.

His mind clicked into action, and he raced back to his room to quickly ready his bags and dress. "Kay!" he shouted. When he was finished he smelled his armpit, and decided he couldn't do anything without being able to withstand whatever emanated from his body when his arms were raised, so he put on some deodorant. "Kay!" he repeated. With no answer, he voice-activated his mobiGlas to call Karath, and realized that the beeps in the other room were going unanswered; he paused with the deodorant in his hand mid-application.

He ran into Karath's room and picked up her mobi. Confused, he quickly searched the suite for her and assumed the worst when he found nothing. He grabbed what was necessary from both their baggage, and set off out of one of the hotel's stair exits, to travel on foot through what was left of the waning darkness.

Karath had been out all night, spending most of her time sitting by the docks, letting the unending sound of shallow waves carry her to calmness. By the time she got back to the hotel, police had swarmed the place, and one look up to her suite showed a party of investigators and a coroner, complete with news drones filming and broadcasting from right outside her suite room window. She feared the worst.

Manne was dead or alive, she thought, and in either case, she knew the best thing for her to do was to get back to the ship hanger. She flagged down an automated taxi, and made her way back.

When she got there, the sun was already high in the sky, the hangar bustling. Without Manne's ship ID, they wouldn't just let her waltz into the bay, so she visited the main office to search for someone she knew.

No luck.

She left the office and stared at the large opening to the hangar, already constructing a plan for how she was going to sneak in. Just then, a large, fat hand gripped her shoulder, and she spun around, startled.

"Weren't you the girl yesterday with all the scrap?" the man asked.

"Y-yes. I need to get to my ship, but don't have my ID," she replied.

"I don't see your truck, did you finish selling all that scrap in one day?"

"No, of course not, my co-pilot's still out there sellin' the rest of it. I came back to check up on my ship."

" _Your_ ship, you say?" he inquired skeptically. " _Your_ co-pilot?"

"You got a bad ear?" The sassiness was real even though her story wasn't. "Yes, my ship, are you gonna help me through or not?"

He squinted back at her and chuckled. "Yeah, kid, follow me." He motioned her to follow him and when he turned his back she exhaled relief and dipped her head down. He lead her down a path to the side of the hangar, behind some large shipping crates.

The man turned his head to talk to her as they walked. "You ever been to Nul?" he asked. Immediately, she noticed that they were both out of the line of sight of the rest of the hangar.

"No," she responded.

"You should go sometime, there's a big cruiser on Ashana done crash-landed years ago. The ruffians took it over and turned it into one heck of a city."

"Where are you taking me?"

He disregarded her question. "There's a tevarin boss, there, name's 'Tee'. Word on the relays is that he's lookin' for a couple a pirate-killers done whacked his goons."

She slowed her walk to gain some distance from him, desperately looking for a door, a crevice between the crates, a vent, anything she could use to slip away, though she had her doubts that he would let her.

"Word has it," he continued, "that the killers be flyin' a retrofitted scavenger." She stopped and stared as he slowed his walk and began to turn around.

"Maybe those pirates deserved it," she said lowly.

As he turned far enough to reveal himself, Karath eyed the object in his hand: A rusted old combustion pistol that's probably seen better days many years ago. He smirked his mouth open to reveal a golden tooth among rotten ones.

"Or maybe I deserve this bounty I'm ah get for killin' you for my brothers on Nul five."

She couldn't believe where she was: She'd gotten so close to the ship and this Meat-head Sausage-fingers stood in her way. If only she had one of the pistols she'd left in her room. He was too far to take his away from him, and she was too close to make a break for it without the high probability of getting shot by that rusted old thing he called a gun. Thousands of thoughts went through her head, and half of them were about resisting. The other half came from the fear that she had nothing going for her, and all the hope in the stars wasn't enough to sway the tide of the universe to her favor, that she would die here behind some shipping crates to a goon for gold teeth. She stood silently and curiously watching his finger as it slid down the trigger—her entire existence rested on the broad shoulders of a dock worker, and the tick of a second-hand would be what separated two split existences: the universe where she lived to carry out her vengeance; the present one where she didn't.

Just then, as she was staring into his eyes, they jolted wide, bulging, and before she got a chance to read his expression he was already dead, his face squished against the floor, the last face he'd ever make in this universe. Manne stayed crouched post-pounce over his large body, leaning on the knife impaled in his thick, round skull, and as he caught his breath he stared at the black lines streaking up and down his fat, rolling arms.

"WiDoW junkie," he said.

" _ECKLESTEIN!_ " Karath gasped, and Manne looked up at her, disapprovingly.

" _Now_ , you call me that?"

She took steps toward him, each quicker than the last, and he released his dagger and rose to embrace her over the twitching body of the junkie. She squeezed tears out of her eyes and her beak shook.

"I got back to the hotel, they...I thought you were dead, Manne."

"I thought the same about you, dead or captured."

She pulled away to look up into eyes she thought she'd never see again. "What do we do?" she pleaded.

"We gotta get outta here, and you...you gotta be strong. If the reach of this gang extends this far, this fast, they're not going to stop hunting us. They won't simply tell their connections around the galaxy to 'never mind.' It just won't happen. We've disrespected them too hard to just be forgotten about." Manne looked into her blank face, the look of a child in shock, still trying to process the event, still trying to grasp hold of something to anchor her down in the storm that found her.

He gripped her arms. " _Understand_ , Kay? You've got to be smart, you've got to be strong. _It all starts now_."

She closed her beak and nodded, furrowing her feathered brow as she focused in on him. "Mhm." she agreed, just as an energy blast shocked and absorbed into the shipping container nearest to them. Manne and Karath ducked startlingly from the shockwave, and the split second it lasted was long enough for Manne to draw his energy pistol, find his target, and fire. The sound of the pistol firing next to Karath's head made her flinch, but she quickly reached for the second pistol, holstered in Manne's backpack, clicked the safety off and turned towards her already incapacitated attacker.

Manne was behind her, running in the other direction with her free hand in his own, and she almost let go of the gun as she was pulled towards him.

They ran to the end of the container row, meeting gun blasts and immediately hopping back to take cover. The moment the shots paused, they both peeked out, high and low alternatively, and shot at their attackers.

They were seasoned shooters: They'd been firing these same energy pistols for years, and at this distance had their accuracy down to a one shot, ninety-nine percent accuracy.

Their attackers gripped their hearts, where the first blasts got them, before second shots got them in their necks and they dropped down to the floor convulsing. Manne and Karath bolted for their ship as the hangar's security alarm went off, and in the distance they could hear the echoes of police sirens.

As they got to their ship's cargo bay entrance, they were already taking distant fire from two sprinting security guards far across the hangar. Karath quickly entered a code into the door panel and as the bay door dropped they fired back in the direction of the guards.

"Run in, Kay! Get the ship up!" Manne yelled.

"Copy that!" she answered.

She disappeared into the interior of the ship as Manne stayed at the cargo bay door, firing shots out of it as it closed. He ran over to the E.V.A. pressurization exit on the side of the ship, opened the hatch, and fired out of it using the hatch cover as a shield. He hit the chamber's comms button. "Karath, when you get the ship up, power the right side shields and get us the hell outta here!"

Karath was already in the bridge seat firing up the engines. " _Copy that!_ " she yelled.

The ship rumbled awake with the deep hum of the engines, and as the panel lit up, Karath preemptively placed her fingers over the shield controls. Manne leaned against the wall in anticipation of the shield activation, but outside of the ship, one of the guards had taken aim at the inside wall of the pressurization chamber and fired blasts in succession from his energy rifle. The blasts made contact with the wall just as the shields went up, and the energy surge in the area created arcs from the blast point all around the chamber, shocking Ecklestein. He convulsed, sending out a loud growl through gritted teeth before dropping to floor, the hatch closing shut behind him.

"Where do we go," Karath asked frantically over the comm. "Where are we _going_?"

She began to panic at the silence, and in a rush of gut instinct, she flew the ship straight out of the hangar and rode a wave of laser blasts up into the atmosphere. "Manne," she cried, " _Ecklestein!_ "

No answer.

They were jetting out of the atmosphere, the urban sprawl laid out before them, washed out in sunlight and disappearing into Selene's surface as the bridge window became saturated by the deep black of outer space.

The sound of a stomp and a grunt behind her made her jump and look back to see Manne leaning against the doorway with his hand gripping his side.

"Manne!" she exclaimed. A smile flashed only halfway across her face before the blinking light above the door revealed Manne's shirt, pants, and hands, all soaked in blood, and she gasped as she slowly looked back up to his grimacing face staring back at her.

"Manne," she gasped, and he responded with a shaky voice through clenched teeth.

"Let me drive, Kay."


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

Karath stared for a few seconds with her mouth open at the figure standing in the doorway. A million thoughts hit her at once; the realization that this person standing bloodied before her was the only close friend she'd ever known weighed the heaviest in her mind. It dragged her down, pulled her jaw to the floor of the ship. She'd seen suffering pirates and poor paupers in her life, nobody she knew, and watched them starve, loot, steal, harm, choke, bleed, die. Though he stood up, regally, with color in his face, an unseen weight pointed Manne's head towards the floor, pushed his shoulders down, curled his back over. He was obviously, absolutely, a broken mirror reinforcing her own pain and dark horrors back at her. She had no comfy cushion of distanced empathy to separate her from the truth, no castle wall to stand upon to witness the vague horrors below: Manne _was_ her castle, and he was crumbling before her eyes, brick by brick.

Karath sat, frozen in the pilot's chair, thoughts of denial swirling about her mind, until Manne blew the storm away with his voice.

"Karath," he said. "Listen to me."

She blinked and pulled away embarrassingly from her trance. "Yes, Manne?"

"Get out of the pilot chair, and let me sit in it."

She complied and stepped slowly out of the chair, watching Manne stumble one step before her body willed itself over to him to help him walk. She noticed he'd already bandaged himself, wrapped med-cloths around his wounds, which meant he'd most likely already taken the adrenaline shot from the medpack. Even through the bandages she could see how much he'd already bled, and the adrenaline was making his hands twitch and shake as he pressed buttons on the console, focusing in on the warp target.

"Strap in," he said, lighting a stim.

"Y-yes, sir," she replied, and quickly sat in the co-pilot's chair, nervously searching the board for something to do. The ship activated its warp, and as they came out a dozen kilometers from a repair station just preceding Vega Belt Alpha, Manne turned and eyed her direction.

"I have a first name, Kay."

At this she broke into tears. "Ecklestein," she weeped. "Ecklestein, what's happening? We need to get you to a medic."

"It's too late for that, Karath." Lights blipped on the ship's radar. "I need to get you as far into the belt as I can, they can't know that you're headed to Bremen."

"Bremen?" The tears paused. "What do you mean?"

"My," he said flinching, feeling the effects of both his physical affliction, and hopeless mental yearning sparked by nostalgia. "My home. There's something waiting for you there, something that I hoped I'd have more time to give you, to hand to you myself."

"What are you talking about?" she replied frantically. "What is it?"

"It belonged to your mother, bundled with you when I found you, hidden and warm. I never opened it, it was obviously special and I wanted to eventually give you something that I had nothing to do with, something untouched. Inside is something undoubtedly linking you to your past, maybe your father."

Flashes of energy blasts began to shoot across the bridge window, finding their way into the asteroid field beyond, and sparked the continuation of tear streams down Karath's face.

"You'll give it to me yourself, Ecklestein," she said. "You'll get us out of here, you'll give me that thing and we'll both find out, together." She held her head, gripping at her head-feathers. " _No_ , Ecklestein, _TOGETHER!_ " she screamed.

Seeing her denial forced tears and whimpers out of Manne for two seconds, before he shook it off and forced himself up out of the captain's chair to do what he knew he had to.

"C'mon, Kay!" he desperately whispered, and pulled her out of the chair, taking her kicking and screaming down the corridor to her room. Her feet dragged against the walls, she yelled no, don't, many equivalents and some incoherence, and gripped at Manne's arm like she was grasping at a dream she knew in her heart was once reality not too long ago. Manne moved with such vigor that for a moment she forgot his impending mortality, only to be reminded by the stickiness of his blood soaked garments, his constant wheezing.

When they got to her room she only protested more, but was helpless as Manne locked her into her bed, strapping her in with braces she never knew existed. She clawed at them wildly but it was no use, there were no buttons on the harness: They were remotely controlled. She gave up, hyperventilating, looking up at Manne through a tear-soaked face which begged for none of it to be true.

"You gotta be smart, you gotta be strong," Manne huskily voiced. "And don't trust anyone." He turned before the tears came and shuffled towards the door, wishing he had just one more day to spend with Karath, one more hour, one more minute. He looked back and thought about all the missed opportunities, all the things he ever wanted to tell her, ever wanted to teach her, ever wanted to see her experience, but the dreams he had hoped to turn into memories began to cement themselves into a dark walkway of regret, and the sounds of the ship's shields failing forced it to fade. He pushed the door control, and as it slid closed he and Karath locked eyes past the moving panel until they were looking at each other through its window, and said more to each other gazing through it than they ever had through anything else.

Manne punched a long series of numbers on the lock next to Karath's door, a combination she was unfamiliar with, and with a final gaze through the window he hit the last number. Almost immediately the ship rocked, with shockwaves from explosions shaking the walls harder and harder as the explosions got nearer. As the final one went off, Karath closed her eyes, saving her from seeing Manne becoming vaporized by a bright flame, which quickly faded to a storm of debris, and then darkness, and she passed out from the sustained g-force.

The ship broke apart into large sectional pieces, scattering metal, plastic, and glass, in every direction. Manne had designed the ship to break apart in this fashion to mask the release of the escape pods. Karath's bedroom shot away from the wreckage as the ship blew apart, sending itself away into space, initiating its launch at a risky but survivable 100 meters per second. The pod was pressurized and possessed the complex electronics and controls on-board to float on an uninterrupted trajectory into deep space for a month, with a system of thrusters and sensors that would keep it spatially safe from potentially threatening objects moving towards it. After thrusting for a few seconds, the pod exposed controls from within a shelf Karath had decorated with knick-knacks, and went into stand-by, waiting for its inhabitant to activate its distress beacon.

The pirates dropped away in every direction to peer at the debris, looking for signs of life, but there was too much to follow. The troupe stayed out there in space for a while, filling it with radio chatter, sending out notices to the relays that they were looking for a human and a young tevarin, before losing interest and heading back to Selene to convene at a local pirate den.

Hundreds of kilometers in the distance, a pod floated into the Vega Belt, Karath inside of it, and a faint glow from Vega's reflection against the large floating rocks distanced around her, shining over her just barely as she lay nestled inside the darkness that was once just her bedroom.

Karath woke to a start, panicking, making attempts to rip off the harness binding her to the bed, frantically searching out the window for anything other than the deep dark of rock-dotted space around her. She looked around her bedroom at the walls and shelves she no longer recognized, as they had morphed into the impressive control console of the escape pod. Tiny blinking lights lay speckled all over the room, and for a moment she stared out of her window at the asteroids slowly crawling by in the far distance.

She shut her eyes, again, remembering the recent past, remembering who she had just lost, resorting to crying silently against her pillow, still strapped to her bed which had bent around the contours of her body to form something resembling a deeply reclined pilot's chair.

It was all too fast, too quick, she thought; it was like the rug covering a trap door had been pulled out from underneath her, and what she landed in was a deep empty well with soggy bricks, and too lonesome to be real. She wished it was over; she wished he had just let her stay with him on the bridge, as Tee's pirates whittled the ship's shields down until the blasts ripped open holes in its hull, melting the metal away, sending whirlwinds of debris out and about the ship. She dreamed of suffocating next to Ecklestein, dying in his co-pilot's chair, where she belonged, next to the only thing she'd ever known. She imagined a thousand deaths as her pod creeped through the asteroids, and she lay unmoving, solemn, depressed, broken, sunken down into a dreamstate, never awake, never asleep, never moving, for days.

Eventually, hunger and thirst stirred heavily within her, mixing together, and her will to live and move drank it, causing it to climb out from the depths of her depression, scaling the cold steep shards of the black ice that her soul had frozen into, and as she lapped her crusted beak, her dry eyes creaked opened to search over the tiny lights in the room and the reflections of Vega off the passing asteroids, the same view that had sustained for days from within the pod.

She weakly struggled against the belts which bound her to her chair, and a slight panic gave her a certain energy and kick-started her mind.

What is this? She thought. There _had_ to be a way to unbind these braces. After fiddling with them some more, she looked out at the panel, at the lights blinking against the dashboard.

"Ecklestein," she whispered. He had designed the pod, the ship, all of it. There had to be a way to get out of the bindings and she knew that he would have expected her to be able to figure it out.

It's not a button, she thought to herself, and quit reaching for hidden panels and grooves.

"C—" Her voice was rusted over. She grimaced and squirmed as she cleared her throat and swallowed, finally finding the ability to say the word.

"Computer."

On the console, a small solid red light appeared, beckoning for instructions. "Harness." she managed to say, and a beep sounded as the locks clicked, prompting the fall of the belts off the side of the chair. Karath halfway-smirked a sigh of relief, and moved her head against the chair as its pieces shifted and transformed to an upright position. She slid her legs over and knelt on the ground, leaning up against the chair, with her head in her arms on the seat which was warm partly from her living on it for days, mostly from the biowaste which travelled through her suit's excreta system.

"Computer," she said, and the inviting red light on the dash lit up again.

"Food," she croaked. "Water."

The sound of the panel's hydraulics startled her, and two chambers against her wall slid open, revealing bottling tech and a pocket of rations. She weakly grasped a prepared water bottle, and alternately gulped and rested until she was ready to eat. When she was finished eating she sat on the floor of the pod for several minutes, dazed as the blood moved into her digestive tract, and stared off through a window in the wall behind her bed that she never knew was there, entranced by the passing of large, slow-moving asteroids, eventually falling into a restful sleep for several hours.

She awoke confused, looking around, realizations once again crushing her as she remembered what happened to Ecklestein, and where she was now. "Ecklestein," she called out. "Ecklestein," she would whisper. Over and over again she repeated his name, hopelessly wishing that in doing so she would balance out all the times she would call him Manne, when she knew he preferred the other. It was too late, and the regret, the loneliness, the lostness now her only possession as she floated through the big dark, it weighed on her all at once and crushed her as she felt truly empty inside.

She found herself awakening again, hungered, and felt around the dimly lit ration chamber for more food. The sustenance gave her the energy to feel a little bit better, a little more hopeful; she finally began to feel the will to live, though it was still a tiny flame in the huge empty shadow that enshrouded her heart.

She decided to fiddle around with the console, and in the ship's memory she found a digital message, typed up by Ecklestein. She was drawn aback, frightened at first, but eventually opened it, reading it through tears.

 _Karath. If you're reading this, it means I'm gone. I'm sorry I can no longer protect you. I just hope I've taught you enough, and that you have the strength to carry on, because life is so much bigger than what I've shown you._

 _What I really need to apologize for though, is lying to you._

 _As we cross through Elysium, and I peer down at Jalan, admiring its beauty, I feel disappointment in my species, that we weren't able to figure out how to come to a peaceful resolute between us and the tevarin. Jalan, or Kaleeth, as your people called it...your people deserved to keep it._

 _You have been robbed of your past, your culture, and I feel like I could never measure up to what you deserved to have. All I can offer is the best I have, this mediocre representation of my people's culture._

 _I've watched you grow and progress, learning faster than I ever could about the world you've been born into. I'm already running out of things to teach you, and I feel like all I have left are the stories of my travels._

 _There's just one more thing that I, now, as you read this, am sorry for, that I could not give to you myself. I pity myself, for some major part of me doesn't want to see you grow up, doesn't want you to know where you came from, but I pray that by the time you read this, I've already told you the story of how we came to be together._

 _Buried deep in the beautifully woven blankets I found you in was a case, no bigger than a book. I kept it, key in, laying in my house on Rytif, hoping one day I'd come up with the courage to show you. I don't know what it holds, but I know that when you find it, when you see it, you'll be forever lost to me. It'll be at that time that you're ready to begin your journey through life, without me. The contents of that case will be a seed, planted inside your heart, one day sprouted and grown until you can no longer keep it in, and it will push you away from me, to find your own way in life._

 _No, it isn't right for me to keep it from you, and I'm sorry. But I hope you can forgive me, and understand that I didn't do it to hurt you, I did it so as not to hurt myself._

 _Embedded in this console is a digital fingerprint that will give you access to my home, along with its coordinates on the planet. When you get there, this code will open the compartment where the case is hidden, and you'll also find something that belonged to your mother. 1437._

 _As we cross over the horizon of your people's homeworld, I look back and see you asleep in that bed of yours, peaceful and innocent, and though you will grow to be something more, I will always see you in my mind the way that I do now._

 _I'm sorry I couldn't protect you._

 _Be smart. Be strong. I love you._

 _~Ecklestein_

Karath let the message stay posted on the screen as she went back to her chair and laid in it. Curled up, she was too far to read the words, but gazed at them like she was looking directly at Ecklestein, as if he were there in the pod with her.

For a time, she rested, and thought of the times they spent together, all the worlds they saw, all the systems they travelled. As each moment passed, the power of the now—of living in this pod, dancing around a ring of uncertainty—gained a stronger foothold in her body.

She began to think more and more of this case that her mother had left her.

She eventually found the will not only to stand, but to look out at the universe before her, past the pod's window, past the slow-spinning asteroids, past the outskirts of the Vega system, and into the great beyond; she looked out into the forever that held her destiny, her past, and most importantly, her future. When she thought about that future, something stirred within her: Ecklestein's spirit. It was that which had imprinted itself onto her heart, and she knew now that she not only possessed the will to go on, but the capability to reach out into the universe, grasp her destiny, and rip it out from the stars.

 _Be smart; be strong._ "I will." she replied, and motioned over to the computer to activate the pod's short-range distress signal. Walking up to the viewing window, she stopped with her face inches from it, scouring at the boulders outside, her warm breath fogging up the glass.

"Come on."


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

It was only hours after Karath activated the distress beacon when she entered the vicinity of a small mining crew chipping away at an iridium-rich asteroid deep inside Vega Belt Alpha. A half a dozen kilometers away, a tiny, blinking red light caught her eye, resting atop a large grey rock, projected against the speckled backdrop of the asteroid field. As she neared it, she could see a heavily dusted, cargo-class ship, 170 meters long, with the words _Deep Cradle_ painted in sapphire blue behind the bridge windows, and planted in the asteroid's surface with a large drill vehicle mounted nearby, spinning away, kicking up rocks in all directions.

Inside the pod, Karath sat strapped to the pilot's seat, awaiting a comms request. A flashing yellow light appeared against the console, and she stared at it, taking a few deep breaths to lower her heart rate.

"Computer," she finally said. "Answer."

A man's voice shuffled languidly over the communications channel, the mouth from which it sounded seeming to have half a sandwich in it. "'Ullo?" it said.

Karath winced as the channel was left open, transmitting peanut butter lips surfing the comm waves, splashing right down into her ears; she immediately wished for the golden silence she'd had for days.

"Comm, open," she replied. "This is the pod, I've been out here for _weeks_ , are you mining?"

"Weeks?" it replied. "How much do you weigh? We don't have much food on board."

Karath furrowed her brow and rolled her eyes. "I don't need much food, I don't weigh more than 40 kilos."

"40?" The voice coughed and struggled. "Yur a little thing, what do yeh taste like?"

Karath sat silently, contemplating continuing on through the void.

"Haha," he chuckled, swallowing the rest of what was in his mouth. "Only kiddin', we'll come get'yeh."

She waited, staring out at the Deep Cradle for a few minutes before a hatch opened in its side and birthed a gunmetal-grey, light fighter with a dual TR2 engine, which hastily flew towards her pod. She had concerns of being shot out of space but was also impressed with the pilot's maneuvers. He flew unnecessarily fast, but with precision, and it quickly latched onto her pod and flew her over to the rock, gently placing it on the surface and returning over to its dock.

Karath packed a bag full of necessities and suited up in the pod. She brought with her the rest of the rations, some water, a knife, an energy pistol, and a copy of Ecklestein's letter uploaded onto a high-mass drive stick, which also had on it thousands of videos of planetside scenery, and music ranging from modern hits to classic pieces from all over the galaxy.

Her hand crept up to a button next to her door that read _WARNING: Pressurization Lock_. She turned slowly to look at not only what might be the last time she ever saw her bedroom, but what could very well be the last time she touched anything—save her suit—that Ecklestein's hands ever engineered. "Ecklestein." she whispered to herself, and took a deep breath, straightening up and reaching for the depressurization button.

Bright red lights and a loud alarm were set off, followed by puffs of smoke and steam entering the chamber, and the shelves or anything else exposing the controls of the pod flipped and sealed over, exposing knick knacks and stuffed animals which fell to the floor of the pod, bouncing afterwards, floating upwards alongside Karath's feet and legs as the Localized Artificial Gravity system was destabilized. The door slid open, introducing the dead silence of space Karath hadn't heard in many days, and she floated out timidly over the asteroid's surface.

She reached the ship, and as the EVA de-pressurization chamber door panel bent open, empty bottles of Snazzle and Liberty beer, along with empty ration cases and used utensils blew out of the door, some hitting Karath, specks of food and old juice getting on her suit as she winced, disgusted, but continued to step into the chamber attempting to avoid stepping in trash. "Ugh." she grunted.

The chamber finished it's pressurization procedure, and the interior horizontal doors opened up, revealing the unkept furnishings and rusted walls of the Deep Cradle's entrance hallway. Streams of oxygen shot out of Karath's helmet as she unlocked it, barely lifting it up before a stale smell entered under the glass; she frowned and dipped her head down with her eyes closed, and held her helmet to her hip, cheerlessly attempting to acclimate to her new home.

Light, quick-moving footsteps down the hallway pulled her eyes open, and she looked towards the sounds in anticipation. A young human boy of a similar age popped out from around the corner and stopped dead in his tracks, frozen, and stared at Karath, up and down, locking into the bluish-silver feathers on her head.

"Hi." she stated.

A loud hydraulics noise sounded elsewhere just as the boy opened his mouth to speak, drawing his attention back the way he came, and he darted off leaving her standing there looking at nothing. She rolled her eyes and followed him in an unhurried stroll.

The ship's innards were worn, with cracks in faded paint and rotting trash decorating the corners of the hallways, forcing Karath's hand to her beak. She eyed the elbow joints of the doors, the electrical piping, and noticed that though the only modern parts of the ship were haphazardly-done repairs to its fundamental areas, the structural elements as a whole seemed to be in full working order, though very unsightly.

She caught up to the boy in the cargo area where he was assisting a man unload cases of metal off of a mining vehicle. She entered the room, and the man stood up tall and studied her as the boy continued to work away.

"Well, well," he voiced. "A _tevarin_."

"Yeah?" she replied.

"It's been a while," he said.

"Been a while since what?" she asked.

"Let me guess," he said, disregarding her question. "A _fugitive?_ "

Karath stood and said nothing, staring back at the man as her hand twitched towards her backpack. He broke eye contact and spun around, reaching for the boy's shoulder, gripping it hard and pushing him in Karath's direction.

"You should go see my twin brother, Marty. Oily, here, will show yeh the way, won't yeh?"

"Y-yeah, of course, Loo'." Looty turned towards her and wore an encouraging smirk, waiting for her to turn around to follow the boy. As she left the room, she could swear that she felt him searching her up and down with his gaze, and a shiver jumped up her back when she was finally out of view.

As the pair travelled through the smelly hallways of the ship, Karath noticed that Oily walked completely unphased by the mess.

"How long have you guys been out here?"

Oily thought for a moment. "Just a couple of months."

Karath quickly wondered at the condition of the Deep Cradle before becoming distracted by the peculiar situation she had found herself: This was the first time she was alone with someone else that was her age. She decided to inquire.

"How many sol are you?" she asked.

"12, yeh?"

"Wow, I'm turning 12 in a couple of days, actually."

Oily looked back at her with genuine excitement. "Really," he smiled. "That's _perfect_."

Karath cocked her head to the side. "Perfect?" she said.

"Yeah!" he exclaimed. "I've never gotten to hang out with someone my own age before." Karath blushed under her feathers, and quietly smiled towards the ground.

As they entered the bridge, Karath finally found the source of the confectionary artifacts that had been left for discovery around the entire ship. In an oversized, custom pilot's chair, with thick, titanium-braced supports, and hydraulic tubing many centimeters in diameter, an obese man sat, spinning around as they entered the room to meet eye to eye with Karath, wearing a huge grin and a large, unidentifiable nugget of meat perched into one of his tooth gaps.

"It's yeh," he chuckled. "Welcome aboard!"

Karath couldn't keep her eye off the nugget. "It's me, hi," she managed to say. "Name's Karath."

"Wouldn't have guess yeh a tevarin," he replied.

"Sorry," she said, and Marty replied with a chuckle.

"Karath's gonna be 12 soon, like me!" Oily butted in.

"Is that so?"

"Yeah," she stated.

Oily peered at both of them as they stared in quiet silence towards each other, a muted conversation going on between them. Karath's hand kept twitching to reach into her backpack; her senses were blaring off all over the place.

"So, _Karath,_ is it?" Marty started. "What happened to yeh?"

Her brow creased and back straightened. "I was attacked by slave traders."

" _Yeh?_ " Marty replied. "Weren't yeh with anyone?"

"Do I have to be?"

"At yer age," he said, tossing some fried potatoes into his mouth, "yeah." Karath's eyes flickered in Oily's direction, catching him turning his gaze down and away with awkward motions.

"I manage," she said bluntly.

"Well yeh couldn't a' managed very well ending up in that escape pod there." he said, and Oily's eyes opened wide as he looked up at Karath to watch her respond.

Karath held her unwavering stare. "I destroyed half my ship killing a dozen pirates," she said without blinking. "The escape pod was the only undamaged thing in space."

At this Marty halted his chew, inhaling a few seconds before letting out a boisterous laugh, sending soggy crumbs all over his stomach.

" _Fan-tas-_ tic!" he managed to yell, the volume of his voice sending half a grimace over Karath's face.

"I think I believe her, Marty," a voice said sneaking out from behind her. "Would you expect lies to come out of a face like that?" Karath spun around, startled, but relaxed after seeing the distance between her and Looty.

Marty's face calmed as he shot Looty an incredulous look. "Out of a _tevarin?_ " His and Karath's gaze met slowly. "I'd expect just about anythin' from worms to space-trash to come out of a _tevarin's_ mouth."

Immediately, the gears in Karath's mind started spinning as she regretted ever switching on her distress beacon. The urge to resist pulling out her pistol was getting more difficult by the second, and she gripped her helmet so hard it began to creak. She reached up to her pack just as Looty's thin lips began to move.

"Oily," he said. "Why don't yeh go ahead and show the guest where she'll be stayin', I'm sure she wants rest." Oily walked with his head down, and Looty reached out with his gangling left arm, caressing the young boy's flat stomach as he passed. "She's going to need it to help us haul that iridium," he said, smirking.

Karath watched Oily, head cocked, questioning everything about these three, and glanced quickly at the brothers before following him out of the chamber. Another shiver jumped down her back as she waded past their gazes down the hallway.

When they were a safe distance away, Karath decided to pry some answers out of Oily, who seemed to be expecting the interrogation. "Oily," she whispered.

He turned and smiled. "Karath?"

"What is with those two, the brothers?"

"What is with—" He contemplated the question. "How?"

"Are you a slave?"

This question he understood. "Well, not exactly. They found me on Selene, a few years ago, and I've been with them ever since."

"Where are your parents?"

He looked back silently and shrugged.

"You don't know where your parents are?"

"I dunno _who_ my parents are."

"What?" she pressed.

Oily stepped slowly to a stop, and prepared to tell her a bit more about what he remembered. It was appreciated, but Karath noticed something about Oily: There was no disobedience in his attitude, no defiance, no insubordination. His relationship with his past reminded her of her own—before a week ago—except his possessed a kind of acquiescence that captivated her, drew her into the sadness that the understanding would surely bring with it.

"I lived on the streets of Selene ever since forever, fightin' for scraps, for warmth. By the time I met Looty I been in jail over a dozen times, theft mostly. I got pretty good, but it's hard to stay outta the system when yeh seen 'em so much they recognize yeh wherever yeh go.

"Marty and Looty were in the foster care system for years before I landed in their home. They," he said, turning red, "they took care o' me. They loved me, showed me a different way of livin', one that wasn't desperate. It felt good."

Karath peered into his side-glancing eyes in an attempt to understand the things he wasn't telling her, the things about their relationship that he blushed about instead of revealing. They decoded each other's silence for a moment, before Karath decided to pry further.

"What kind of people are they?" she asked.

"What do yeh mean?"

"Well," she said, looking away, "how do they treat you, _physically?_ "

At this the boy gave her a sharp look. "They _care_ about me, always have. When they bought this freighter, they didn't have to take me along. They coulda thrown me back to the system, back to the _streets_."

Karath decided it was something she didn't need to know more about, as the more she thought about it, the more she caught a gag feeling rising up out of her belly. It was like the experience of boarding this place had gifted her with distastefully ugly pieces of the rock she landed on, and she just wanted to throw it all back up. She needed to change the subject. "So what do you do here?"

Glad to be asked about his responsibilities, his expression brightened. "I help with the hauling, and a little bit of drilling here and there. I'm also a better pilot than the both of them combined, been flyin' since I was 8 sol!" he said with a grin.

"Me too." she replied, smiling. Although she chuckled on the inside: She'd started earlier, when she was 5, but didn't want to ruin his moment. "So that was you that picked me up, then?"

"It was! How'd yeh like it?"

"Getting rescued? Great, I guess," she replied dryly.

" _No,_ " he said. "My _flying._ "

"Oh." She thought back and remembered being frightened by it. "It was...fast."

She said the word he was hoping she'd say. "I know," he voiced proudly. "I'm only _12._ "

"That's great," she said flatly. Even though he was a little daft, and a little bit annoying, she somewhat liked the boy, and if clouds of awkward ambiguity didn't surround his relationship with his guardians, she might have actually liked him, as his flying skills _were_ honed, and they were the only two of their age, probably, for hundreds of thousands of kilometers. She studied the contour of his jaw line. I guess he is kinda cute, she thought.

They arrived at the room and Karath studied it closely. A desk with a computer console lined the left wall, and a compartment sectioned the right, with an indented shelf above it that housed old books, some young adult fiction novels, mostly textbooks on flight, piloting, and asteroid drilling. She eyed the neatly-made bed in the corner and wondered for a second as Oily disturbed it, removing the beddings and tossing them onto the floor. He moved over to the wall compartments and paused for a second, looking up at her.

"Yeh can clean up in the wash down the hall while I get yer bed ready." he encouraged.

Karath blushed under her feathers as she realized that she hadn't cleaned up for many days now, and she had become used to her scent. She quickly exited the room as Oily chuckled under his breath.

Much to Karath's surprise, the washroom was cleaner than the bedroom she had just exited, and took solace in the fact that for the first time since arriving here, besides being in the bedroom, she was the worst smelling thing in her own vicinity. A genuine smile waved over her face, the first in days, as she inhaled the pleasant scents of the clean, fragrant washroom, before coughing at her own.

She pulled down the suit over her body, watching herself in the mirror, and froze as she noticed a tiny black hair dangling off her suit's interior. With her thumb and forefinger she calmly pinched it, bringing it up close to her face to inspect it. Her heart skipped a beat, and she inhaled deeply to counter it, realizing the strand was Ecklestein's, left over from when he repaired her suit last, that time he revealed a shapely piece of the incomplete puzzle that was his past. She rested it upon the sink ahead of her, and knelt down, transported to melancholia, gazing at it for what seemed like forever.

Finally, she took the hair, kissed it with her beak, and let it wash down the drain. She stared at herself for a few moments longer, letting her mind race down the rivers of her mind, and if the events of the day were boulders, turning the rivers into tumbling rapids, Ecklestein's hair washed them all away, even pushed the mists to the banks, and it was back to clear sailing for her: All she needed now was a ship.

She placed her thoughts in a little box and tucked it away and cleaned herself, staying extra long in the shower to let the warmth comfort her. When she was done she was all collected, smelling like a clean tevarin, and with plumed feathers she strolled back to the bedroom.

She entered the room to find Oily sitting at the desk, working out a digital puzzle, behind him the bed completely made and neat with fresh beddings. He had placed the original sheets on the floor across the room into a makeshift sleeping bag—he gave her his own bed, and it made her feel royal.

She donned a sweet expression, short-lived though as she noticed Oily staring at her in the corner of her eye. She was out of the suit and wearing casual sleepwear, and his eyes glided over her newly revealed curves and puffed out blue and green feathers, his mind wandering into a separate universe.

She audibly cleared her throat, blushing so hard she felt the heat radiate out through her feathers. Oily shook his head, remembering where he was, and looked back at his computer screen disappointed that he'd failed his time trial in the puzzle game.

"Well," he said, "yeh get comfortable, I'll wash up."

"K," she replied.

"Ok," he replied back.

Oily was clean and fresh smelling when he returned, and Karath caught herself glancing at him now and then when he wasn't looking. Her mind wandered.

"We'd better sleep," Oily started, breaking the silence, "Looty dug lots today, we'll prob'ly be haulin' back and forth for ten hours tomorrow."

Karath laid in the bed, eyes up to the ceiling, following the edges of welding marks in the walls. "When do you think you guys are leaving this rock?"

"To sell? I dunno, we been here a while, but there's still so much down there, and our containers are only halfway full. I say a couple months."

"A couple...months?"

"Yeh."

"I see." she said, the wheels turning in her head, exploring what little options she had. "Hey, I've been meaning to ask you," she said timidly. "Why do they call you Oily?"

He chuckled. "Actually, my name is _Olly_ , well that's what they used to call me back home. When I met Marty and Looty they ended up callin' me Oily after they saw how dirty I was all the time. It stuck."

"Oh," Karath replied. "I see."

They said their goodnights after Karath ate a bit from her ration, and she laid mentally and physically exhausted in the bed. The two were asleep after a while, and Karath dreamed of floating in EVA in deep space, with nothing around her, drowning in a sea of black, unsure of how she got there or even how much oxygen she had left.

She awoke to a start and glanced about the room, confused. She looked over at Olly's bed sheets to see them empty, and through the cracked door she heard distant voices. She sat up for a minute in an attempt to translate the whispers she heard before her curiosity pulled her out of bed and down the hall in the direction of the sounds.

She stepped lightly through the dim, red-lit hallway, avoiding trash, pleasantly reminded of the smells they emitted, and finally reached the chamber where two voices spoke lowly with each other. She put her ear against the cold steel of the wall and eavesdropped.

"We can't—" Olly started.

"Why," Looty interrupted. "Are yeh startin' to _like_ this girl? Yeh can't like a tevarin, Oily. They're bad news, they're _all_ bad news. Before yeh were born they were trying to wipe us out the galaxy."

"But that was a long time ago, and Karath, she's different, I can tell."

"She _seem_ different, yeh. But they all show their true colors, one day." Olly looked down with nothing to say, and Looty stopped to rub his shoulders, consoling him. "She just a tevarin, Oily. We all know where they come from, what they're like, what their religion tell 'em to be. They can't be trusted, have I ever steered yeh wrong?"

Olly looked up at him. "No, yeh _love_ me, right?"

Looty took him into his arms and caressed the back of his head. "Of course I love yeh, me and Marty, we both love yeh, and that why I'm trying to protect yeh from 'er. Yeh simply can't trust a tevarin, they're _barbaric_. After two wars, seeing what their religion does to 'em, they're _all_ the same."

"Are they?" Oily replied.

"Of course they are! I been around long enough to know. I seen what the tevarin refugees did to the people who took them in, _everyone_ saw it. They were thieves, rapists, the lowest of the low. Your _friend_ out there, she runnin' from somethin'. Do yeh think she be floating out here in a escape pod if she didn't do somethin' wrong? Think about it, boy."

Oily looked down at the floor as Looty rubbed his back, battling internally with his own logic. Looty must be right, he thought, it all made sense: He was older, had seen more. Oily had never met a tevarin who wasn't a gambler or a drug dealer before meeting Karath, but a muted muffled voice in the back of his head spoke against it all, always questioned the things Marty and Looty taught him, begging the question: What if they were wrong? The tevarin, he thought, weren't they just people, too? People with aspirations, opinions, honor, logic? Could it be that maybe they _weren't_ all the same, and that experiences with some couldn't possibly ordain universal values for all? Besides, back on Selene, Oily knew plenty of horrible humans, even a few really bad _Banus,_ and Banus have a pretty good reputation among humans. Why was it, he thought, that the bad batches of the Banus and Humans were labeled on a case by case basis, that it were their environments and situations that turned them astray, evil, unfavorable, but that the same couldn't be said for the tevarin, as if they were _innately_ lacking goodness? And what did Looty or Marty know about their religion anyway, to bad mouth it the way they did? Didn't every race have religion, and were the texts so different in substance? Should it be not the religion, but the _person_ , that answers for their actions? Freedom, and Life, are the only two true gifts we've been given by the universe, were those not universal values among the people themselves, just as people, separate from the cultures to which they belonged?

Looty noticed Oily looking down, silent, confused. He grabbed his chin and pointed it towards his face.

"Me and my brother love yeh more than anythin' else in the galaxy, isn't that enough for yeh to trust us?"

It was as if the growing voice in his head was once again muted, the voice that asked questions instead of giving answers, that wondered about the unknown, contemplated beyond the labels given to him by his surroundings, and he relaxed and smiled, giving up his freedom into the hands of one he trusted to do the thinking for him: _It was easier_.

"I trust yeh, Looty. I'm sorry," he said, and smiled. With that, Looty brought his face closer to his own, slowly, and kissed him on the lips, puckering twice, and when he let go he brought his nose up to his washed hair and inhaled deeply.

"Been a while since yeh cleaned up," he said, smiling.

"Yeh," Oily agreed.

"It's time for bed, Oily," he said, motioning to his sheets. "I _missed_ yeh."

Outside the room, Karath was frozen, crouched, her face red under the feathers with rage, her ear still up against the cold steel. She stood up, with fists clenched so hard they shook, ready to burst into the room and beat both of them down until there was but one femur left to use to beat Marty with down the hall, who was probably half asleep with food sliming out of his mouth and his sides spilling out of his chair.

She noticed her breathing loudened, and covered her mouth as she walked backwards to Oily's room, careful not to make a sound, disgusted by the noises she heard bouncing around the hall. When she got back she grabbed her pistol out of her bag and climbed into bed. She'd have a big day, she thought, she needed to get what little rest she could, if it were even possible.

Six hours went by and Karath managed to sleep for two of them, and she awoke to Oily opening the door to his own room but pretended to be asleep. He grabbed the undersuit for his EVA outfit and changed into it. Before he left the room he called out to Karath gently, telling her it was time to get up and get to work.

"K." she replied quietly.

When he left the room she got out of the bed and stretched and did some pushups to get her blood going. She packed all of her things back into her bag and put on her EVA suit, hiding her knife and pistol within it, and walked to the bridge.

When she entered, Marty was eating and farting, staring out the bridge window at Looty and Oily in the mining rover across the way.

"So, Karath, are yeh ready to g—"

"What are you going to do with me," she interrupted. "What's your plan here, to work me, to make me your tool and slave, your _toy_ , like you two have done to Olly?"

Marty swallowed what food he had left in his mouth and slowly turned the chair around to notice Karath standing 10 feet away, dressed, with her helmet in one hand, and an energy pistol in the other pointed directly at his nose.

"Now what the hell do yeh think you're d—"

" _Answer_ the question or I'm going to blast the fat off your neck." She clicked the gun's safety off, and Marty looked at her wide-eyed as he heard the intimidating charging sound of the pistol, seeing her finger twitch at the trigger. "Hurry up," she stated.

"T-Tee's pirates. Tee's pirates are coming, they shot out a bounty all o'er the system for a human male 'bout 30 years, and a young tevarin girl 'bouts yer age."

"How long 'til they get here?"

"Th-they should be here any minute."

Karath noticed a red light on the dashboard and recognized it as an open comms button. Her eyes darted across the bridge window and saw that the rover had spun around and was making its way back to the ship: The comms were open and Looty and Oily had heard the whole thing.

Karath panicked for a second and looked back at Marty, who wore a stupid smile over his face and a meat strip in one hand. His other hand was over his armrest pressing a little orange button above a hole.

The blast blinded Karath as she dove out of the way, dropping her gun and helmet to rub her eyes. She didn't feel anything so it must have missed, but when the second blast sounded, she crouched and screamed as she felt the heat from it enter her side, the energy being absorbed into her suit and directed down into the floor of the bridge. With her eyes closed, she locked onto the direction of the sound of the blast, pulled her knife out, and dashed towards it, leaping after a few steps and coming down with a hard stab. She felt that she had landed on Marty, her feet planted into his fat, bulging legs, her knife sunken deep into his chest. Her vision started to come back as Marty brought his hands up to her throat and squeezed. Karath yelped through her restricted airway, and stared into Marty's face, seeing that it was filled with horror and panic, and pulled her blade out of his chest and stabbed him right in his left eye, forcing him to release his grip just as her vision was starting to go dark again around the corners. She fell off of him and slammed into the metal floor, rolling over and coughing.

As she was catching her breath she heard loud footsteps down the hall coming towards the bridge. She dove for her pistol across the floor, gripping it as she rolled past, and with one knee down she crouched in a shooting position aiming directly at head-height on the bridge door.

The door opened revealing Looty, rifle in hand and helmet off sporting a panic-stricken face. The moment the door opened past him, a blue streak of energy bolted at his forehead, snapping his head back and dropping him dead to the floor, with Oily standing right there behind him, horrified. Karath pointed her pistol at him, getting up on two feet.

"Don't move, _sex toy!_ "

" _What. Did. Yeh. DO!_ " he exclaimed in disbelief. His whole world had shattered before him; the only people he knew, the only people his broken mind had cared for were gone. He was always confused, lost, saw the world so dark and untrusting that the so-called love that these sick pedophiles showed him was sadly the best thing he ever had, the warmest comfort he'd ever known, and as they lay there dead before him, slain by a tevarin—who was only ever fabled to him as evil—it seemed the little voice of logic that rarely peered out from the depths of his mind was gone forever, lost in the big dark that was the wretched universe of his tortured soul.

"Don't move," Karath repeated, walking towards him as he stood there, shaking, with tears in his eyes, and utter fear worn over his entire being. "They didn't love you. They _used_ you, they were horrible, disgusting people, and you're too naive to see it."

" _Yer_ horrible," he replied. " _Y_ _er_ the bad one, _tevarin!"_

" _You_ know nothing about me! Why I'm here, who's been hunting me. _They_ killed the only thing I've ever known. Did they even tell you who's coming to claim me? Tevarin pirates!"

"No!" He looked down and away in confusion. "They wouldn't deal with tevarin. Yeh never _trust_ a tevarin!"

"It's true. They're slave traders, Olly! They might even come here and take _you_ as a slave! If the money was right, Olly, Marty and Looty would've just _sold you._ "

"NONE OF THAT'S TRUE! THEY LOVE ME!" Olly, broken, beaten, sat mumbling to himself against the hallway's rusted wall, as something sounded from the bridge console. Karath turned to see it was a communications request, and noticed blips a few dozen kilometers away on the radar screen.

She looked back at Olly, who currently wasn't of this world, and she felt guilty, felt sorry for him. In another universe they might've been good friends, but this one had dealt him a bad hand, and part of her—the empathetic part she had inherited from Ecklestein—felt absolutely crushed for him, but also knew that she couldn't save him.

"I'm sorry," she said, holstering her gun, wiping her knife clean and putting it away. She grabbed her helmet and put it on as she ran past him down the hallway towards the ship dock.

When she got there she hopped into the light fighter that Olly used to retrieve her, and the ship's manufacturer was familiar to her, luckily, so she wouldn't have to figure out how to pilot it. She started the ship and activated the gate control, and as the door lifted she looked out into the universe with drive and resolve to do what she had to, to survive, and thought for a second, that maybe that was the same thing that Olly was doing: _Surviving_. Two sides of the same coin, she thought, and activated the ship's afterburners, scorching the interior of the docking bay and jetting out and off this crazy rock, the likes of which she wished never to see again.

She burned her way out into the asteroid field, looking back at the ship one last time, and warped un-obscured to the Vega-Bremen wormhole.

Moments later, back on the asteroid, a heavily customized Casse Aerospace Hurricane, reflecting Vega's light off its black and silver trim exterior, had landed in a large cloud of white dust. Inside the Deep Cradle, Olly sat, ripped out of his trance by the sounds of the depressurization chamber down the hall. Slow, heavy steps, lurched towards him as fear brought him back to reality. He gazed out into the dark, red-lit hallway at the shadow that approached him, and tried multiple times to say something through the chokes in his throat.

"H-hey?" he managed.

The figure closed in on him, seemingly gliding through the mist and the darkness like a ghoul, and when he got but five feet away he stopped as the light from the bridge stretched out through the door and revealed his face: It was the exact face of Olly's fear, the fear that had been ingrained into him through years of conditioning. The unknown face of that once distant fear had finally manifested before him, just as his world had been flipped on its side.

Tee looked down at him and smiled.

An unsheathing noise sparked screams echoing throughout the rusted, trash-filled hallways of the Deep Cradle, and eventually faded to a grim silence.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

Karath arrived at the Vega-Bremen jump-point and passed through without hesitation. She could feel the looming presence of Tee's pirates stretch out across space, grasping at her ship's tail: the feathers on her neck stood out straight; her eyes constantly twitched toward the radar in anticipation. When she was out the other side, she warped to Rytif, afraid she would be interdicted before she even got there.

She approached Rytif and wondered at the big tan rock. Its cities were few and far in between, and when the ship's navigation took her down through the atmosphere she questioned whether or not she was headed in the right direction. As she neared the planet's surface, a town came into view a few miles outside of the well-established urban development, Stalford, but she doubted that she would be able to find a port to dock at: It had the smallest urban development she'd ever seen up close.

It made her feel nervous, afraid that somehow Tee's influence had already reached this far and anyone she met was just going to hand her right over to him. As she got closer she noticed that it was expansively mostly farmland, the machine harvesters toiling away, from this height looking like little insects caring for a hive. She saw a hangar near a cluster of buildings in Stalford's direction and headed there, sending out a beacon for a landing request half-expecting no return signal.

Her request was approved, and she was part excited, part terrified, so she flew over the town into the hangar as quick as she could. When she landed, she felt even more nervous seeing nobody else in the whole place. A boy a few years older than Karath, wearing what could only be loosely assumed were dock-wear, exited an office and walked towards her in a quick pace. Defensively, she opened the cockpit, stood up with one foot on the ship's hull with her hand in her pack, gripping and charging her pistol. The boy waved as he continued in her direction, stopping about 30 feet from her, wearing a wide smile.

" _Wow,_ a _tevarin!_ "

Karath stood unwaveringly, studying the center of the boy's face, ready to blast it away.

"We don't get many of your kind, here," he continued. "Well, actually we don't get many of any kind: You're the first visitor we've had in days!"

Karath loosened her grip on the pistol and put her hand to her side. "Yeah?" she stated.

"Yeah! My name's Tip. I'm here a few days out of the week, and the others I work at the library."

"This place has a library?" she asked in genuine concern.

"Doesn't everywhere?" he replied.

Karath shrugged her shoulders and stepped down the ladder. The ground comforted her warmly, as if the planet itself was greeting her.

"My name's—" she started. "It's Kay."

"Good to meet you, Kay," he replied. "Kinda young to fly, you out here by yourself?"

"Yeah, you're kind of young to be running a hangar," she said.

"My dad owns it, I help him run it, well," he thought for a second, "even though I'm here more than he is. I guess it's payment for all the dinners he and mom give me. 'Food don't come easy' he always says."

Karath cocked her head listening to him ramble in an attempt to grasp his peculiar nature.

"Except," he continued. "Really, the harvesters do most of the work for us—all, actually. And the separators and the lifts, the packagers...I guess food does come kinda easy out here, thanks, K!"

She was taken aback. "Thanks for what?" she said.

"Your presence here has gifted me with the courage to stand up to my father," he explained. "I'm gonna go tell him right now that he can run his _own_ damn hangar!"

He sauntered off as Karath stood there blankly, confused at his attitude, but his disinterest in who she was made her feel better about being here, eased the tingles down her spine, tingles that she was having trouble getting rid of.

She pulled out her mobi. The town didn't have more than a few thousand people vastly spread across the land, but she gasped as she read the distance she'd need to walk to get to Ecklestein's estate. She straightened up, shook it off, and walked towards the hangar exit to search for public transport.

She hopped into the only automated air taxi the hangar had, and was greeted with robotic pleasantries and direction requests when she sat in it. She spoke into a grated mic screen next to an artistic decal which read _Stalford Air Services_ , and gave the address before the taxi immediately started up and rose into the air.

As she floated over and through the town she took in what culture she could from the viewing windows. The few people she managed to see moved slowly, seemed to talk slowly, and a chance meeting among any two or more of them almost always led to smiley conversation: It was unnervingly peaceful, but also a welcome change from her past few days in outer space.

She questioned what kind of people it were that grew up here, where they ended up, who they turned out to be, and then remembered that this was the place where Ecklestein grew up. She thought about the library, the calmness of the town, the air about the people, and began to tear up as she realized a little bit more about who Ecklestein was. She didn't come to any grand revelations, but simply seeing where her only loved one grew up really tugged at her emotions; she never would have understood this part of him without being exposed to this particular thing and it made her sorry, sorry for every time she snapped at him, was immature, made him feel bad. She cried in the backseat of the taxi, embarrassed that even the robot understood her expression but gave silence in respect, instead of trying to say words when they both knew no words would help.

Ecklestein's estate was 30 miles of farm squares away from the town center. As they landed, she paid from a joint account she had with Ecklestein, and the taxi thanked her jovially before taking off back towards the hangar. She stood in a yard and gawked at the big empty space that surrounded the big empty house. With grassy fields, large, thick-trunked trees sprouting out selectively across the landscape, and painted-blue skies all the way to the horizon: It was the most peaceful, picturesque place she'd ever seen.

The house stood 3 stories tall, with a hundred feet from one end to the other of a smoothed out, stone-slab foundation, and large tinted windows fitted along all sides of it. Smooth stone pillars atop the foundation stood guard around a lush garden that thrived throughout the entirety of the home's second level. Karath slowly walked up the steps leading up to the garden, entranced by its beauty. She stepped through it with her hand out, caressing every plant she could, inhaling the aura of the garden, letting the smells of all the different plants permeate her soul.

As she got to the center of the garden, she came to an open space with a small, unassuming console, below which an elevator must surely have come down to allow entrance to the living space above. She inserted her data stick in the console, and as it read the digital fingerprint Ecklestein left in it, pressurized hydraulics sounded above her. The lift came down, illuminated by the same amber glow Karath remembered from their salvager. She inhaled the last of the garden's scent as she walked into it, and exhaled, gazing upwards, as it slowly lifted her up into Ecklestein's home.

The glass doors slid open and as she stepped into the wide open room of the living space, all the lights turned on, electronics and other knick-knacks began to move and make subtle noises as they worked away; a large hot tub decorated with exotic wooden fountains made soothing water sounds in the corner of the room; a complex stereo system, hidden from view, played classical 21st century music recordings from Earth hundreds of years old. She spent several minutes taking slow steps and gandering about the living space which took up the majority of the house; she slid her fingers across the old destroyed-leather couch which lined the walls past two corners; she peeked into what was a large kitchen, complete with marble islands and an open fire pit; she gasped at the wallscreens that covered every inch of every wall, showing serene footage of breathtaking scenery across different planets on year-long loops.

She sat on the couch and looked out through the window at the orange light of the sun setting over large trees a hundred kilometers in the distance, and laid her head against a soft throw pillow. She felt like she was in Ecklestein's presence; she felt like she was at home. For the first time in a while, she was at peace in this house she'd never been in. She thought that, at this moment, she was closer to Ecklestein than she'd ever be.

The music and the sounds of the home rocked her to resting, and for the first time in perhaps forever, she had a long, dreamless slumber.

She awoke in the early hours of the dawning day, hungered and thirsty. As she sat up on the couch eating a ration, she decided it was time for her to search for this relic Ecklestein left for her. She recalled the code from the letter, _1437_ , so she looked around for the nearest control panel, and punched in the numbers. She hit enter, and a slow-moving panel creaked open from the space inside the bedroom.

She walked up to the thick fogged glass door of the room and it slid open, begging for entry. This room was large, with lots of open space and a floor of hardwood in some areas, and smooth soft fabric where the bed was. She tracked the newly opened chamber to a large open square behind the bed, and peered inside.

She found a case the size and shape of a large flat book, took it out, and sat on the synthetic-fur covered bed with it laid out in front of her, staring at it for several minutes. A magnetic coin rested in an indentation: The lock. She twisted it and felt a click from within the case, and opened it slowly.

Laid within the case, was a picture of an adult male tevarin, and the military badge that he was wearing when the picture was taken. He had bluish-silver feathers on his head, just like Karath, and was standing in a proud manner in front of a heavy Tevarin fighter ship. Karath had learned basic Tevarin from Ecklestein, and could read the symbols on the face of the picture.

"Yaruf-Haj," she read. "Your father."

She barely got the words out before her beak quivered so hard she couldn't speak, whimpering as the tears streamed from her eyes. "My father." she repeated, and stared at his photo, studying his face, the shape of his body, and the bluish-silver feathers on his head. She was burning it all into her memory so that she'd never forget, and she laid her chin against the bed, staring at the blurry image through tears, firmly gripping the photo, creasing it.

After gaining her composure, she glanced at the back of the photo at a message that was written onto it, and wiped her eyes so she could read it.

 _My dearest Karath. I'm sorry you would never get to know me. I'm sorry that you were born so late you never could have any memories of me. But know that if I hadn't flown with Corath'Hal, on this mission through which we all know we will not live, I would have done you great dishonor. What I've done is for you. For your mother. And I wish you to be great, and honor us, for I know your mother will do her best to instill within you the qualities and values that she sees within me. And when you watch her grow old, remember that each other is all that either of you have, and I hope you can find it within yourself to forgive me for leaving. Life is a journey, here ends mine, just as it begins yours._

 _Honor yourself, my Karath, and know that I love you. My spirit, the tevarin spirit, will always be with you. Be smart, be strong._

The last words rung in Karath's mind as the last words she heard Ecklestein say, and she read them aloud, over and over again to herself on his bed, in his home, stomach tensing, body shaking, tears flowing freely down her pewter-grey beak and pooling in the sheets. She lay there for what seemed like eternity, her mind spinning around like a top that wouldn't fall, the platform upon which she rested tilting, upholding her mind's momentum, and if it weren't for the distant sound of an approaching vehicle she might have stayed there, forever, stuck in a blurry, interminable cyclone.

She stopped shaking as her eyes widened, and sat up in the bed trying to look through the walls as her stomach continued tensing. The sounds of the vehicle only got louder, and knowing that Ecklestein's house was the only thing for several kilometers all around, her defensive instincts started to warm up. She walked up to the window and searched as her eyes met with a bright, flashing white light approaching from a distance.

 _Civilian Security Forces_ , she thought. She kicked into motion, and checked in the compartment one last time for she thought she saw something else hiding in there as well: It was a small, sheathed blade, unused, brand new yet in an ancient design, made out of a light, titanium-alloy, a high carbon steel edge, and with tevarin engravings all over. She secured it in a loop on her backpack, took the medal and the picture, and headed for the lift exit with no ideas of where to go thereafter. She peered around the room for a few seconds as if to say goodbye to Ecklestein, and attempted to collect herself as the doors of the lift closed in front of her.

Her eyes stayed locked onto the opening of the doors and as they separated she saw a CSF ship, through the tall plants of the garden, landing a few dozen feet from the home's marble entrance steps. She ducked out of sight and moved through the garden towards the rear of the house. She got to the edge and scanned the steep decline of the stone foundation and fancied sliding down it. The sound of the lift doors giving way to the officers' commands signalled her descent, and she swiftly slid off of the house and landed in the tall, unkempt grasses that surrounded the foundation.

Karath slithered through the grass around the house and peeked around its corner at the unmanned CSF vehicle, contemplating whether or not to chance being able to commandeer it without fail. She wisely decided against it, as the officers more than likely could remotely deactivate it before she was able to take off, or worse, mid-flight. She crept backwards through the grass, her eyes locked on the lights darting around the different rooms of Ecklestein's home.

The sun was perched on the distant treeline when Karath was a kilometer away from the house, still backpedaling slowly through the tan grass. She heard the CSF vehicle switch on, and watched carefully as it rose into the air, and started floating in her direction. At first she froze in disbelief, but turned around and started sprinting when she realized it was coming straight for her. She swam through the grass, and as the officers got closer, the distance between the blades grew greater and greater until eventually a clearing came into view. She panicked, her heart racing, and though she knew she was less safe in a clearing she felt she had run out of options anyway: This was it.

As she birthed out through the grassline into the clearing she slid on the ground and stuck her hand in her backpack, but froze with her hand on her pistol as she helplessly studied a human figure slowly limping towards her with a Behring ballistic rifle pointed at her chest.

"K-Karath, is it?" he stuttered. "You're, I mean, it _is_ Karath, isn't it?"

She stood frozen as her eyes drifted down to the obvious prosthetic underneath his black cargo pants.

"It's fake," he continued. "I mean, it was bitten off by a _landshark_ , cool huh?" Karath slowly removed her hand from her backpack and raised both of them into the air beside her head. Her eyes twitched over to the CSF vehicle landing behind the man, next to a small anti-grav bike.

The officers walked up to the pair, not once taking their eyes off of Karath. One of them spoke on the approach.

"She can't be more than 10 years old, look at her."

"They made it seem like they stirred up half the galaxy," the other one said. " _T_ _his_ little thing made all that trouble?"

"It was a special request from Tee," Peg said. "And she wasn't alone. Manne's out there, somewhere." A somber look melted over Karath's face as she grimly looked down, her eyes glazed, pointed at the ground behind him. "Or maybe not," he continued. "Maybe they _did_ get him."

Karath's eyebrows scrunched together and she looked up at him in a rage. "You'll _never_ get him," she gritted. "And one day, he's going to hunt every single one of you like rats and stick his blade through your throats."

The officers glanced at each other incredulously, one with his lip curled, the other with his mouth opening wide to say something. "I guess we'll just leave you to it, then, Peg."

Peg nodded and the officers walked back and as they approached the ship, one of them turned with a hand on the ship's door. "Hey maybe we'll see you at the hall, you should come by before you head back to Nul and gamble away that leg of yours." he yelled, laughing boisterously before entering the vehicle, and they took off in the direction of Stalford, leaving Peg alone shaking his head.

When they were alone, Peg still stood stoically before Karath: His rifle had hardly lowered an inch. "Off with the bag," he ordered. She reluctantly complied and stood there with her hands up at her shoulders, squinting at the bright sun over Peg, anticipating the piercing shot of the rifle, and hoping that he was a good shot so that she wouldn't have to suffer.

"Is Manne dead?" he said finally.

"Of course not."

"Then where is he?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" she said firmly, her gaze piercing Peg's insecurity. He nodded at her to step away from the bag, and limped over to pick it up.

"This thing's heavy," he said, struggling.

"I'll carry it," she replied.

He smirked back at her, tipping his head up in the direction of the bike, and she stepped, seeing at the edge of her vision that he'd lowered the rifle and loosened his grip.

"You're one of Tee's goons?" she said.

"Something like that," he said back. "And what about you, are you Manne's goon?"

"Manne doesn't have goons, doesn't need a—"

"Doesn't need any 'cause they, I mean he's got _you_ , huh?"

She halted and he stopped behind her. "Your name's Peg?" she said.

"That's right, for my leg, it was, I mean, a giant snake bit it when I was swimming." His lies revealed some truth about him, Karath thought, and turned slowly to look him face to face. "What do you plan to do with me, Peg?" she said lowly.

The creases in Peg's forehead disappeared. "Well, Tee wants you, I mean, if we _found_ you, dead."

Karath gave him an honest, innocent look. "So _are_ you going to kill me?"

"Yeah, well I mean . . . " he trailed off. It was a question he didn't think he'd have to answer, and now that he was actually thinking about it, taking her prisoner was his way of stalling something that maybe he didn't really want to do. "How old are you?" he asked.

"I'll be 12 sol tomorrow."

He flashed back to when he was young, when he drifted from town to town, spending more time in the deeper urban jungles simply because it was easier to leech off the people there. He looked into Karath's eyes and it reminded him of his own, when he had no one to trust but himself.

Karath watched him carefully and saw the wheels turning in his mind. "How old are you, Peg?"

"How am," he started. "I mean, how old am I? I'm, I mean..." The life he lived yielded little need for him to keep track of his age, but even so, he really had no idea. He never had a specific birthday, let alone a birth year, he couldn't even begin to figure out how old he really was, and he'd never know. "I don't know, are you messin' with me?"

Karath held her gaze. "I'm not messin' with you, I'd just like to know a little bit about the person who's going to end my life."

"Know a little bit..." he trailed off again. How long had it been since anyone really tried to get to know _anything_ about him, he thought.

Karath noticed his pondering, then was startled when she saw his upper body dive forward and stop as if a rope were tied to his neck from behind, and she gasped as her eyes followed a black, blood soaked blade retract back through his throat. He dropped his rifle and her bag to the ground, gripping his throat when he landed, spinning around to look through bloodied eyes in horror at the figure standing over him.

"T, T, T—" he spat, but the assassin finished his life by skewering him right through his heart with pinpoint accuracy, and Karath could've sworn she saw his heart explode from the impact in his chest. The event dropped Karath to the ground as her heart raced, her emotions dancing atop both horrified and grateful extremes, and she almost forgot that the killer still stood before her.

"Karath." he said, her bag now in his hand. She looked up as he tossed it to her, and she was too weak to hold it up so it yanked her upper body downwards as she caught it. She studied her savior—if that was a word she could use—carefully as he cleaned the blood from his blade. He was wearing an EVA suit, helmet off, and his shiny ebony head-feathers reflected the sun-lit scenery which surrounded him. A _tevarin_ , she thought, and her mind raced in wonder.

"How did you find me," she gasped. "Who are you?"

The tevarin's feathers twitched to the realization that she had no idea who he was. He covered his blade and took notice to her own; his eyes felt over the engravings in the sheath, the look of it, the design. "Where'd you get that?" he asked.

She looked down at the sheathed sword as the feelings flooded back into her body. "My mother." she replied, using what strength she had to straighten up, proudly.

"Your mother was a soldier, then?"

"My father was." She looked back at him curiously. "Who _are_ you?"

Tee searched her mauve-colored eyes and thought he had recognized something he hadn't seen in a long time, but couldn't quite place it. He pierced the gaze of this young girl of a tevarin, who had seared his reputation, who had slipped his grasp more than most ever could: He judged her. This child, spawn of a warrior, represented something that made him uneasy, that made him question his own path, his own fabric. He stayed his blade and decided to see where doing so would take him, and if not just to have a young, capable, malleable soldier—cut from a warrior's cloth—in his ranks, then at the very least he could find out exactly what it was about her that penetrated him.

"Sithen," he said.

She looked back at him in question.

" _Sithen,_ " he repeated.

"Sith-then," she echoed. "Is that your name?"

"It was my name at my birth," he said. "And you? _Karath?_ "

A familiar shiver hopped down the small of her back. "Yes?" she said, gulping.

"That was your name at your birth?"

"Y-yes, I believe so."

"It is beautiful, strong," he encouraged. "Only strong tevarin would name their spawn something like Karath."

"Th-thank you," she said, blushing, the encounter with this well-spoken tevarin quickly fogging up the glass between her and recent events, "Sithen."

A strong gust of wind swayed them aside and sounded out from the distant trees and tall grass all around them in a wide ambient symphony. Karath's uncertainty had crept back into her mind, and before she realized it she was looking to Sithen for guidance.

"It isn't safe here," he encouraged. "A murder like this in this town will be quickly and easily noticed. Have you somewhere to go, young tevarin?"

"No," she admitted.

"Then come with me, I can take you to safety," he said, flashing a quick look at her sword, "and maybe teach you how to swing that thing like a tevarin."

Karath looked at the blade carefully as another pushy gust of wind broke her trance. Like a tevarin, she thought. Maybe this had been what she'd been waiting for. Maybe to clear her head she had to move on, fill it with new memories, and what better place to be than alongside a tevarin, one of her own. She could learn from him, if not to collect that tevarin part of her that she'd missed growing up with Ecklestein, then in the least to learn how to wield her blade like he had: Like a tevarin.

As they jogged through the grass towards Sithen's ship, she gazed up at his back and wondered: There was something about him that tugged at her subconscious, something about him that seemed so familiar; somehow, she should _know_ him. She let the feelings shapeshift into romanticized nostalgia, an elusive puzzle piece morphed to fit into an empty space labeled home, some hopeful belonging.

Sithen's expression radiated a shrewdness that Karath couldn't see—nor would she really have understood if she saw it—and underneath the mask he began to realize what he had acquired, what was in his possession, what _tool_ he could grow Karath into. For hers were the exact circumstances of one yearning for strong leadership, who would follow, who could become the epitome of refined power. He had caught her at the exact age and moment he needed to begin his slow and insidious imprinting onto her personality, and he knew that as a tevarin he was precisely what she would think she had lacked in her infancy, and what he could manipulate her to thirst for in her adolescence. As he realized what this was all unfolding into, his almost uncontainable drive translated into a smirk under his feathers, at the back edge of his jade-black beak, that telling symbol of truth that he'd always keep angled away from his newly found protege...


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

Sithen and Karath stepped through the forest until a black heavy fighter class ship with silver trim revealed itself among the large green bushes and spotted round-leaf trees. It sported a single, TR2 engine, two S2 missile racks, and two S4 hard points bolted onto either side of its nose. Sithen arrived at the ship as the hatch opened and the ladder descended to the ground. He looked back to notice Karath gawking at the ship, inspired. She noticed him waiting for her and shook it off, hurrying onboard.

The pilot and co-pilot seats were tandem, with the co-pilot seat up front. She hopped in and realized that she didn't recognize the Casse Aerospace interface: Looks like she'd be learning more than swordplay, she thought. Sithen closed the hatch, started the ship, and they were up in the air in seconds.

The boost speed of the ship surprised her, and as she half-panicked looking around the dashboard for some way to contribute, the big spacial towns surrounding the old, developed city of Stalford caught her eye, and inspired a desire to settle down in a place like this, a place where people stopped each other for friendly chats, where the only noises came from the wind, a place with an empty hangar, a place with nothing to do, a place with a _paper book library._ The details of the towns quickly escaped focus, with the white froth of the clouds taking over, before the big empty dark made itself present, pulling Karath out of her dream and back into reality, forcing her to think about the dark-faced tevarin behind her whom she was now putting so much trust in.

"We're warping to the Bremen-Vega jump-point," Sithen stated. "Are you ready?"

"Ready," she replied through the comm, and switched it off as her eyes locked onto Rytif, maybe for the last time, to see its light streak out and disappear out of her sight, out of her mind.

"Rytif's a pretty place, ain't it?" Sithen asked.

"Yes it's, well the prettiest place I've ever seen up close."

"The people are good fighters," he said.

The words he used panged in her mind. _Fighters_ she thought. She had seen the exact opposite. Not that they were bad fighters but she just couldn't imagine a quiet place like Ecklestein's hometown breeding much violence.

"It was during the war," he clarified. "The second one."

"I thought the war was over by the time Tee and his pirates raided Stalford." A heavy silence weighed down the comms.

"Some people's wars never end," he stated. "You need to remember that, especially as a tevarin."

They dropped out of warp 10 kilometers away from the Bremen-Vega jump-point, and Karath's mind wandered as they entered and navigated it, sparking relevant questions in her mind that might help clarify Sithen's past.

They exited the jump-point and began their warp chain around Vega Belt Alpha, and it were as if all the rocks in the field found their way through the slivers of where the cockpit cover met the ship's black and silver hull, in through the latches of her helmet and the stitches of her suit, up through the feathers on her neck and down deep into her chest, through her heart, that warm, fleshy doorway to her soul. Flashes of memory cached up in her mind and flooded her body: with scenes of Olly, whom she left broken next to the warm corpses of his disturbed family, the only family he'd ever known; with the image of Ecklestein outside of her bedroom window, his pale skin and dark brown eyes being blown and burnt away, out into space and permanently into her daydreams; with the swirling, spinning darkness she strafed through, that endless, blanketing void she suffocated in, buried for days to eternity. She would have panicked had Sithen's voice not pulled at her focus.

"Humans are _weak,_ " he whispered.

"Wh-what?" she replied, too surprised to manage to utter anything else intelligible.

"Humans," he continued, "weak. It takes a whole crowd of them for one to build up the necessary courage it takes to achieve even the mediocre.

"Their civilians are herd animals, grazing on learned behavior until they're plump with redundancies, satisfied with the truly unfulfilling, and coasting through life, constantly complaining about the things they're too lazy to change: The aspects of their reality plagued by their inadequacies.

"Humans tumble through life like asteroids, and any collision with destiny is merely the fault of the random, chaotic nature of the universe.

" _Tevarin,_ however, we tevarin have honor writ through our bones; the tevarin soul is a rising light that lives and pierces through every generation, _lifting_ us up to destiny. Haven't you felt it?"

She questioned him with her silence.

"You grew up with a human, but haven't you always felt different? Haven't you always felt like there was an untapped power within you, that your words and actions bubbled up from a shallow surface level, obscuring the view to the truth buried deep below?"

Again, she responded with silence.

"You will eventually understand it. It is a pity you grew up with anything but a tevarin."

She felt pieces of her mind tear off into other directions, as part of her thought he was right, part of her thought he had a strong, iron-fisted influence she had missed—being raised by a human. Another part of her still loved Ecklestein. He was not only the balance she needed to effectively be comforted by a man of a different species, but also the balance she needed to be able to even appreciate that balance, as if without a kind hand to guide her she would be immune to the very concept of kindness. He kept the exact distance he needed to lead her but also encourage her to discover how to lead herself, and that kind of sweet-spot, middle-ground parenting gave her the strength to build her own strength, to figure out the tools she had all along to be her own.

As they passed the belt she could swear he was still out there, and he _was,_ she realized, for Ecklestein still existed in her mind, and as she tumbled alone through the universe those parts of him were among the few things no one could ever take from her.

"Anything but a tevarin..." she repeated.

They arrived at the Vega-Nul jump-point, making their way through, and it wasn't until they came out the other side that Karath remembered who else was in the Nul system, and what it was that waited for her here.

"We tevarin have faults, too though, Karath."

She could feel her heart rate accelerating, her adrenaline spooling.

"I was in the military," he continued. "The second war...we fought for years. After decades of preparation it was clear that somehow, what we had wasn't enough. How was it, that we tevarin, after our whole history, lineages of warriors, thousands of generations, how was it, then, that we suffered defeat at the hands of _humans?_ "

Karath looked around at the stars, instinctively searching for a way out.

"Leadership. We had no one but our own leadership to blame. It wasn't the pilots, the technology . . . it was the _leadership._ Ever since Corath'Thal rose up from the ashes of battle and took the reigns up to lead our people across the stars, we were destined to fail, destined to lose ourselves in the fires of war, in flames atop the tainted atmosphere of Kaleeth."

Karath's head-feathers twitched, and she gravely glanced over to the navigation panel at their destination. "Olympus," she whispered.

"Our people deserved better," Sithen started. " _O_ _ur_ people, Karath. We deserved to fly over the fires of _Earth_ , the human homeworld, and watch it turn grey with ash as we rounded them up as slaves, so that we could exponentially expand our control across the galaxy like we were always meant to."

Karath was frozen with fear as they dropped out of warp thousands of kilometers above Ashana.

"Approaching target," announced the ship's computer, and the words echoed around in Karath's head, falling silent to Sithen's words.

"I couldn't follow him. We had lost at the Battle of Centauri, we were broken, and what were his orders? To make a mad dash to Kaleeth? _He_ was mad. It was apparent that he was under the spell of some kind of illusionary honor, hiding behind it, and he was going to take all who were left down with him.

" _But not me._

"I wasn't going to be reduced to particles for a mission like that. I took my best fighters, ones with brains, with hearts, and we took on a new mission: To gain power and influence among the UEE, itself, to grow within their borders and become an unseen virus that would eventually be too powerful to stop once the UEE began to experience organ failure. We would live in the shadows of their biggest cities, in their blind spots, under the guises of criminals and vagrants, and when they finally realized our strength it would be too late: We would already own the very land they stood on."

They approached Olympus, that massive beautiful mess that was once a glorious, Bengal-class carrier, but now was nothing more than a lawless city of gamblers and gangsters. Karath's anxiety steadily raised the closer they got to it, and they quickly and swiftly pulled into one of the ship's old docks, parking in a dark, hidden chamber as the hydraulics from the gate sounded off, spraying steam into the air which became illuminated by the deep red lamps along the wall.

Karath looked slowly around the darkness as the sound from a shattering SLAM bottle electrified her, and she shuddered as she listened to him inhale it all.

"It is why they call me Tee," he said, the smoke creeping from his mouth, muffling his voice. The cockpit cover opened, startling her once again. " _I_ am the next generation, I and those like me will rise up in the dusty undercarriage of the humans. _I_ am the continuation, the securer of the new. _I_ am tevarin, and no matter how long it takes, our people will take over the stars and my symbol will rise up from the ashes of the flames in black, carbon-hardened steel, and people like us, Karath, we will get statues of us made from pearl-stone, and eventually take over the entire galaxy!"

As he spoke, Karath twitched and shook every time he raised his volume or spat from his beak. She had flown halfway around the stars only to be brought right back to the center of it all, escorted by the devil himself. She wished she had the key that would unlock her stiff self and reach into her bag and blast him away, but they were empty wishes, not granted. She sat there, eyes glued out to the darkness, flinching with every noise Tee made as he stepped out of the ship. He turned to give her a stark gaze, his ebony head-feathers and jade-black beak illuminated by the faint, blinking red glow of the landing room's floodlights.

"Leave the ship, Karath."

She stood there staring at him, with a face that must have screamed fear. She reached into her bag and the moment it made a noise Tee had his pistol pointed right at her face. It took him the time between the light strobes to do it: As Karath witnessed him staring at her in one flash, to a shaking hand caressing a pistol in front of intentful eyes in the next, she became disarmed and surrendered.

"Don't be stupid, Karath," he stated. "I would have done it a long time ago, but after seeing you face to face, after looking into your eyes, I realized that you and I have a lot of work to do."

"What do you want from me?" she asked.

He lowered the gun to his side as a wide smirk materialized behind his beak. "Glory, young tevarin."

She became compliant and taciturn, exiting the ship, subconsciously memorizing the sounds of the code he inputted to close the cockpit hatch. She then followed him out the doors into the dark hallways which navigated the Olympus' innards.

They entered the gambling hall and Karath brought her arm to her face to block the introduction of smells she never knew previously existed. She had picked apart rotting scrap from broken ships near gaseous geysers, but those didn't seem to be as bad as the cocktail of SLAM, body odor, stims, and dirty dingo that currently invaded her senses. They walked through a cleared pathway everyone who saw them made, and it seemed like the place stopped to watch them: Gaping mouths and wide eyes followed them through the hall, and even the timers on the games paused.

They reached the stairway in the back that led up to Tee's room and paused as someone interrupted the silence.

"Ay boss can I get first dibs when you're done wit' her?"

Karath turned to see a fat slob of a guy drooling from the mouth at her, chewing on a soggy stim. The comment bothered her more than the smells and it showed on her face. Behind her, Tee looked at his guards for a moment before turning and continuing his slow walk up the stairs, and as they walked past Karath, she watched as they beat him, collecting his gambling chips when they were done. She peered around the hall at everyone watching: After they shot a quick glance back up to her, the hall then revived itself, and the music, the games, the chatter, even the female slaves with the dirty dingos, were as they were before they had entered. Karath watched it all a moment, curiously, before continuing up the stairs and into Tee's room.

She looked at him, already at his desk on his computer reading various reports having to do with slaves captured in the stars and revenue from his businesses, and she wandered around the room slowly, relieved to be breathing air not poisoned by the gambling floor. She looked at each scenic viewing panel, gazing longingly into the grasping beauty of the scenes, reminded of Ecklestein's estate, the pain from it all starting to creep back in, held at bay only by the fantastic nature of the gorgeous scenes before her.

Tee glanced at her now and then, monitoring the child before him that would become his most important protege, and thought about how easy it was to manipulate the youth.

Karath stopped at a particularly unusual looking scene of a large canyon, filled with strange rock formations, against a backdrop of a cloud-filled sky, and looked down to the bottom of the panel, whispering the word that was engraved into it.

"Kaleeth."

Flashbacks flooded her mind: of reading about her father, Yaruf'Haj, in her mother's letter; of Ecklestein, whose life was cut short by the gang she seemed to have inadvertently joined; the blade she had found in Ecklestein's home, a blade from her family, the very people to which Tee had expressed so much blame. She thought about her mother, who let her husband leave her to retain what honor he had left that wasn't already destroyed by Squadron 42; she thought about the sacrifice of her people, that sacrifice that they believed was necessary for nothing else but to live shortly and die in the atmosphere of their home planet, like it was their only true option left.

She turned to judge her mother's killer, the tevarin who believed himself to be the future of a species he abandoned, a species he enslaved, a species he _killed._

The sharp, unmistakable sound of a short blade leaving its sheath forced Tee's eyes up from his work, and he surveyed Karath and the blade she was holding, picked apart her foreign stance, found her eyes pinpointed on his own. He then stood up, grabbing his own blade which had rested against the desk.

"Are you sure you're ready to learn?" he questioned.

She answered with a quick step forward and a two-handed downward slice towards his face. He unsheathed to swat her attack sideward and retaliated with a one-handed cut attempt toward her shoulder: The move was in a single, fluid motion, and his other hand gripped a weathered carbon fiber sheath. She dodged back and shot him a purely focused gaze, with an expression lacking anger, lacking hatred.

She shifted to the right and sliced upwards towards his leg and up across his body, immediately stepping back with her sword primed above her head, dodging Tee's horizontal counter. He sliced again in reverse and she dashed forward, quick as lightning, jumping over his blade as it passed, swinging her blade at his face, screaming. Tee's eyes widened in fear for a split second before he ducked—Karath's blade barely missing his head—and he rushed in as she landed, forcing his shoulder deep into her chest. Her light frame tumbled across the floor, slamming into the wall as she let out a guttural cry from pain and frustration.

"Your style is human," Tee said, panting. "It's flawed, and lacks a tevarin flair."

"Fuck you!" she yelled, and got up to rush him, her face scrunched in anger, her blade cocked ready to attack with a two-handed stab.

Tee swiftly moved diagonally forward towards her, out of the way of the stab and batted her across the head with his sheath. She collapsed to land sprawled out across the floor unconscious as her blade bounced out of her hands.

"Emotion will slow you down, little girl," he whispered, and looked over her limp body for a moment before calling out to his guards over the comm.

As the two stair guards entered the room, Tee was already at his desk, sword sheathed and taking its usual spot leaning up against his desk. He pointed to Karath.

"Grab her sword and go lock her up in one of my rooms."

They complied, leaving within seconds: Nobody liked to stay in the boss' office for too long.

When she came to she was still in one of the thugs' arms, dangling down a dimly lit hallway, escorted by another of Tee's security detail who seemed to be holding her sword. They were talking to each other too much to notice she'd opened an eye to look around, but she still laid limp like a rag. Her head pounded and it hurt to focus, but she managed to catch an arrow sign on the wall with a gun decal and a word that looked a lot like _Cache_ through her blurred vision.

Adrenaline exploded into her body, and she turned up at the tevarin holding her and shot a fast, piercing punch square through his throat, her entire body twisting with the strike and then out of his arms as he fell.

It happened so fast that by the time the other tevarin knew, Karath was already gripping the handle of her sword, pulling it out and slicing him across his beak. He fell to his knees with his back against the red-lit rusted wall of the hallway, screaming through his broken face. He looked up at Karath just in time to see her thrusting her sword into his throat, and with his head pinned to the wall, his scream turned into a gurgle as Karath watched the life leave his eyes.

She turned to the writhing tevarin who was coughing and struggling to breathe as he watched her mutilate his co worker.

"No—" he tried saying through his crushed windpipe, before Karath came down quickly with her sword, stabbing him hard through his throat, severing the nerve cord in the back of his neck, and then twisting her blade as the body of the freshly dead tevarin twitched hard, its legs kicking the air.

She wiped the blood off on the guard's clothes, and sheathed it, sliding it into a slot on her suit. She then picked up one of the energy rifles the guards had slung across their backs, and followed the green-lit arrow she had spied.

It was a store with various guns, grenades, and EVA suits lining the walls. Karath stepped through the door just as the sound of a glass vial shattering echoed around the room. In the far corner of the store, a man was deeply inhaling the fumes from a SLAM vial. Raising his head, his expression went from pleasure to confusion as his eyes caught a young tevarin girl holding a rifle that was almost a big as she was.

"Now who the f—" he started, and a beam fired from the rifle and pierced him through his mouth, snapping his head back and blasting his brains all over the white-lit wall behind him.

She exhaled sharply through a gritted beak and immediately began searching the room. She strapped a couple gas and high explosion grenades to a utility backpack she found, and locked a helmet with a fancy user interface onto her suit. She searched the guns against the wall and decided on a shotgun; as she loaded the final shell into it, the lights in the store went from white to a blinking red, and an alarm began to sound in the hallway outside, so she quickly vacated.

Karath's adrenaline took her through the halls, turning at intersections not knowing where she was headed. She heard running footsteps echoing all over and couldn't seem to find an open door. As she rounded a corner, the door behind her opened finally and she sprinted inside to see that she had somehow made it back to the casino room, and a hundred or so people inside—made up of gamblers, slaves, game workers, and armed security guards—were all staring back at her in disbelief, watching her catch her breath in the doorway.

"Shit," she said, just as a gun fired behind her in the hallway. A bullet whizzed by her head as she spun around, down to one knee, and raised her rifle to the hallway and fired, spraying the men who were running toward her with a torrent of bolts before the door slid closed. She fired at the door panel, exploding it into sparks, and the ground around her broke apart with bullets ricocheting in every direction. She dove behind one of the game tables and quickly took out two gas grenades, priming them as the table was being shredded by bullets, and tossed them into the center of the room.

She knelt up and peeked over the table with her gun and began shooting at various guards as the grenades exploded into a huge gas cloud that instantly filled the room. She dropped her rifle and ran to where she last saw the guards, swinging the shotgun from her back into her hands. She stayed low through the smoke as she ran up to each disoriented guard, shooting them point blank in their upper chests, a few of them in a row before she stood face to face with the gambler who had berated her earlier.

"I-I, hey, _you,_ " he stammered.

Before she could say anything back, they both heard the opening of Tee's office doors, and footsteps on his stairs. The gambler slowly backed away.

" _Sithen,_ " Karath said, grinding her beak. She took off towards the stairway, knelt down, aimed, and fired.

" _Argh!_ " Sithen yelled, being blown to his back against his own bottom steps.

Karath tossed down the empty shotgun and pulled out her blade, and as the smoke was beginning to clear she lunged and landed on top of Sithen with her blade stuck deep into his left shoulder. He looked up at her in pain and surprise.

" _You?!_ " he growled. "I would've turned you into a leader!"

" _You?_ You killed my family, _twice,_ " she replied, Sithen looking back at her, confused. "Ecklestein was the father I never had, and Thela—"

The stairs lit up with bullets fired from across the hall, and Sithen began screaming.

" _WAIT_ , you idiots! I'm right _here!_ "

Karath grabbed a high energy grenade from her pack, armed it and tossed it towards the door. She held the hilt of the sword to brace for the shock wave, moving when it exploded, wiggling the sword around inside of Sithen's shoulder forcing him to grab the blade, yelling as the sharp edge dug into his fingers. She ripped it out of him cutting his hand even more, before shoving it right back down into the same spot, pinning him to the stairs.

"Thela was my mother, you murdered her on Kabal III. _Do you even remember?_ "

Sithen's face was filled with rage and pain, but tried to think back on all the tevarin he'd enslaved and killed: It was such a long time ago he barely even remembered going to Kabal III. Karath twisted the blade again, bringing him back to the present.

"You're making a big mistake, _girl,_ " he snarled. "You're gonna be hunted for the rest of your life."

"You're going to die right here," she replied, ripping the sword out once again, holding it in the air, intending to bring it down right into his heart, but blood blew out from the front of her suit and she fell against the stairs from the impact of a gunshot.

" _No!_ " she screamed, panicking, writhing in pain. She pulled out another grenade, primed it and shoved it under Sithen's body, crawling quickly away on all fours, using the tables for cover. She went through a door on the far side of the hall, wincing as she felt the shockwave from the grenade exploding behind her.

She alternated between upright and all fours as she bore the pain from the shot, but pushed on through the hallway toward the docking station she had entered from before. When she reached it, she opened a mounted box of health kits and gripped a couple against her side as she limped into the hangar.

She reached Sithen's Hurricane, punched the code she had memorized earlier to open the hatch, and crawled up into the pilot's seat. She wasted no time in starting it up, and inched towards the opening bay door as she noticed guards pouring out into the bay, firing their weapons at her. The bullets and laser blasts were absorbed by her timely power shift to the rear shields, and the ship scraped the floor and walls of the hangar as she awkwardly flew out the exit amidst a meteor storm of projectiles.

Back in the broken and bloodied gambling hall, Sithen's goons walked past pools of fresh blood, one of whom had a medpack and was hurrying to the stairs where Sithen lay. He was gripping the wound in his shoulder, deathly eyeing the man who approached him.

"Get me to a ship. _Now._ "


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

"Get me to a ship, _now._ "

"Hang on, boss, you're bleedin' badly."

"Give it to me," he said, grabbing the medpack from the tevarin's hands. He opened it, taking a piece of some small globular mass and shoving it into his wound, yelling and cursing in pain, writhing around the bottom steps of his own office. The tevarin stood there in shock, staring at Sithen's blood-soaked clothes. The medi-glue would stop the bleeding and keep it clean, but how much blood could he have left in him, the guard wondered.

Sithen grabbed and chewed a tablet from the medpack, and looked up towards the guard with hateful eyes.

"Give me some _SLAM!_ " he yelled.

Another tevarin guard jogged over with a vial, handed it to him, and watched him break and inhale the stuff.

"Boss?"

Sithen grunted back.

"Boss, some of the guys over there, they . . . they said they saw what happened."

Sithen ignored him.

"They said you tossed a grenade at a group of tevarin guards."

Sithen swallowed what was left of the painkiller he was chewing on, which seemed to be working as the look of pain disappeared from his face, leaving only fervent rage. The guard gulped as Sithen rose up to meet him, face to face.

" _Where's. My. Ship?_ "

The guard winced from the blood being spat onto his face from Sithen's mouth, and immediately wiped it off. "The girl took it."

High above Ashana, Karath piloted the Hurricane out of the atmosphere and gravitational pull of the planet. She felt herself getting tired, immediately recognizing her blood loss, and let the ship fly as she pulled apart the medpack, grabbing the medi-glue inside and shoving it into her bullet wound. She gritted and grunted in pain, but knew she'd have to close the other side, too, before she passed out probably never to wake up ever again.

She reached behind her, exacerbating the pain, and as she heard the hiss of the glue reacting with her wound she shut her eyes and screamed.

After chewing on a caffeinated pain pill, she finally began to feel able to fly the ship again, so she opened up the warp screen. When it came up, the ship's crosshair hovered exactly over the Nul-Centauri jump-point.

"Centauri," she whispered, just as a pair of blips came up on her radar. She monitored their distance, and to her surprise they stayed a few thousand meters back, never gaining any space on her. She watched their distances closely, and began her warp.

A couple of minutes later, she dropped out of warp a few thousand meters away from the jump-point, and by the time she arrived, she noticed the two ships drop out of warp behind her.

She waited a few hundred meters from it, anticipating the ships' sprint towards her, but they never did: They kept a few thousand meters between them, just like they did before the warp, and she stared at the ships on the radar screen in query for a moment before heading in.

When she came out the other side, she brought up her warp screen, noticing the planets around Centauri, wondering about the Tevarin Wars. She thought about the battles that were had here, especially the famous Battle of Centauri, where the tevarin were defeated by Squadron 42.

She couldn't help but think about Bremen, too, about Rytif, and the boy she met in the ship hangar in Ecklestein's hometown, outside Stalford. Bremen couldn't be the only system in the galaxy with people like those that lived in its small towns. Every corner of the galaxy had places where people stopped each other only to chat, living their day to day lives with adversity or life-altering challenges rarely faced; there were people living simply, planetside, without ever having to wear an EVA suit.

Even down on Yar or Saisei, in this very system, she thought, how many people were bathing in Centauri's rays with nothing to fear, or mining away on Centauri I, with no idea about what people were going through elsewhere in the galaxy?

She glanced back at her radar at the bogeys keeping their distance, and gazed up at the warp screen at the locations on the map, noticing another jump-point, and the whole universe seemed to slow to a stop when she saw it.

" _Elysium,_ " she whispered.

At once she realized. She realized where she had to go, what she had to do, knowing that her course had to inevitably take her to this place, this moment. She felt the stars whisper, the spirits of her ancestors arrive in a gust, her soul start up into a cyclone of ambition: Her final destination was finally as clear as a supernova.

She warped there, to the Centauri-Elysium jump-point, and swore to herself that, one way or another, this would be the last jump-point she'd ever have to navigate.

Karath flew out the other side and brought up the warp map. She looked at the destinations and read them aloud.

"Vosea . . . Jalan."

She reached out with her fingers and touched the word "Jalan" on the screen, and felt a warmth swirling inside her chest.

"No," she said. " _Kaleeth._ "

She warped, and was soon hovering high above the planet; she spun the ship around to look up through the roof of the cockpit, and floated there for what seemed like forever, staring at the planet, tracking the clouds and the wind patterns, memorizing the colors and shapes of the landscape. It felt like she was daydreaming, but everytime she questioned it, the realness of it all weighed her down deep in her stomach: It wasn't just the lack of gravity that was making her nauseous.

Her two shadows reappeared on her radar, and this time began to advance on her position. She turned the ship to face their approach, and when they finally got within a thousand meters, they stopped, and hailed her on the comm.

"Girl," a female tevarin's voice crackled. Karath said nothing, focusing on the ships ahead of her, waiting for a missile blast to show itself so she could begin evasive maneuvers.

" _Girl,_ " a male voice repeated.

Karath opened the comm line. "My _name_ is Karath," she said. "Why don't you just get it over with already."

"Well," the female's voice started, "we didn't actually come here to kill you."

"Then what are you doing here," she replied. "Aren't you a part of Tee's gang?"

"We are."

Confused, Karath sat there with silence over the comms for a few moments until another ship appeared coming out of warp on her radar, and it neared, passing the other two, and stopped a few hundred meters away. Karath instinctively shifted power to her front shields, as the third voice came over the comm.

"You worthless piece of scrap."

Karath knew who it was, and she wasn't going to respond to his words: She had nothing to talk about with him.

"I told you," he continued. "That you'd be hunted down for the rest of your life, didn't I?"

"..."

"Fitting that you've come here, though very stupid. The UEE owns this place now, you think they're going to just let you dance your way in, let you hide away here on Vosea or Jalan? It won't happen. It would never happen. And now I'm going to make sure of—"

His speech was interrupted by a lock-on warning, and a projectile firing out of one of Karath's missile racks. He immediately banked to his right out of the way and watched as Karath sped up to get around and behind him.

" _Idiot!_ That's _my_ ship, I know how it moves, how it—" The missile exploded in his chaff, and the shockwave rocked the ship a bit. "You're dead, tevarin!"

Anything he said fell on deaf ears, as Karath tracked behind him firing her gatling and laser hard points simultaneously, pumping them both at different times to avoid overheating, or running out of energy too fast. The lines of projectiles sprayed over him like whips as she tried to center her crosshairs on him.

He started to sway back and forth, eventually spinning around and accelerating towards her, firing back with his gatling and lasers, and the explosions against the forward reinforced shields made Karath flinch as she accelerated past him to try to swing back around again.

As she flew, she looked back at the two ships, wondering why they hadn't joined the fight, but a lock-on warning grabbed her attention, so she switched her countermeasures to flares and released them.

She spun the ship as hot bullets trailed in on her position, and as she drifted back to head towards Sithen, the g-force made her vision go blurry. She inhaled in short, sharp bursts, trying hard not to grunt, doing all she could not to pass out, and fired another missile. The missile exploded into his shields diminishing them considerably as he flew by. Yells and curses bounced around the interior of his helmet, and he turned the ship back around towards Karath and boosted.

He closed in on her, slowing down from the boost, and at five hundred meters fired a missile, continuing to follow her trajectory as she released a chaff and veered off to their left. He angled in the direction she was going, his speed getting him within fifty meters of her, almost cutting her off, and he released an incendiary missile which detonated right on top of her almost immediately.

It happened so quick she couldn't switch her countermeasures, or shift her shield power to its side, and the blast brought her down into the red and forced her off her course. As she was recovering, she felt the ship get riddled with bullets and lasers, and as her shields reached down to zero she screamed, feeling the ship's hull getting pierced. She boosted away from him and down towards the planet as fast as the ship would go.

Sithen grinned and turned to follow her, only now noticing he'd been fighting without contribution from his gang.

"Come on, _Nes!_ " he yelled. "You do nothing, you _get_ nothing."

The pair began to follow him slowly as he boosted down towards her, down towards Jalan's atmosphere.

As Sithen approached her, he released his boost, clicking a button on his console to match her speed, and started to fire his gatling and lasers at her.

Karath moved from side to side, desperately trying to evade the projectiles, but was still getting hit at every pass. Her breathing accelerated and she started to panic. The projectiles started to dig into her engines and wings and she screamed as her lock-on warning came on again. Sithen had fired his last two missiles and they were quickly approaching her rear.

She let go a flurry of chaffs and flares, and when she was done she decoupled and spun the ship around, tightening her stomach at the direction change. She spotted the missiles exploding before her and locked onto the heat with her last heat-seeker and fired, simultaneously squeezing the gimbal triggers, letting loose a barrage of bullets and lasers as Sithen jetted through the countermeasure cloud.

They all hit him, and after the missile brought his shields to zero the projectiles ripped into his left wing and engine, disabling both as he let out a flurry of screams and curses that almost penetrated his cockpit cover and into space.

"Fucking get her you idiots!"

He was met with silence and turned back to them to see missiles fly out of their racks as his lock-on warning came on. He gauged the trajectories of the bombs and looked down at Karath's ship, which was dropping fast and backwards towards Jalan, and as he looked back he realized who they were actually firing at.

"You traito—"

The missiles took out his wings and engines and the field of mess flew down towards Jalan's surface, the inside of his cockpit painted with blood and shrapnel. His vision blurred, his breathing shortened, and the air around him was quickly escaping through multiple perforations. The female tevarin pilot, Nesca's voice came on over the comms.

"You die with no honor, Tee. You die, massacred like our brothers on Olympus, like Peg on Rytif: Betrayed by your own."

"You can't...you can't," he mumbled. The words formulating slowly and having trouble finding their way to his mouth.

The two pilots turned a moment and watched Karath silently as she dropped deeper and deeper towards Jalan's atmosphere. Over thousands of meters, over the crackling of an open comms channel, the three had a silent conversation before Nesca and her wingman turned and disappeared, warping away into the stars.

Karath's console pulsed as the power steadily drained from it, and when it died she attempted to revive it to no avail. She looked back through the cover and watched sparks fly through the bullet holes in the engine casing as it tried to start itself.

The comm in her EVA suit beeped, and as she opened the channel she heard gasping over the backdrop of what sounded like a steady stream of air being sucked out of a cockpit. Karath looked over at what was left of Sithen's ship, dropping down towards Jalan, at a similar altitude and speed as her own.

"Pathetic," she stated. "Look at you."

Sithen's incoherent mumblings transmitted through his breaking comm.

"Look at you," she repeated. "A _scoundrel_ like you, how fitting that the universe has made this place your tomb."

More sounds that Karath translated to be protests skipped over the static.

"Except here, now, you'll be remembered as a traitor, a _failure._ You'll burn up into nothing, your true form, _bastard_ , and though we'll suffer the same fate, I can die with my honor, like a tevarin should, and _you_ will only die a disappointment."

The comm finally clicked off and Karath was left alone in the darkness of her ship. She looked out at flickers of debris, speckling the backdrop of a universe that calmly gazed back at her demise without objection. Inklings of faint regret and hatred whispered around the interior of her tired mind, tugging at her soul from a quiet distance, wishing to pull her down deeper than she was already falling. At this fated, helpless circumstance, something within her reached desperately for comfort, grasped at the familiar, barely feeling at the edges of the physical void left behind by Ecklestein's death. The thought of his name made his memory more tangible and inspired a bittersweet realization.

It was her birthday.

Karath looked up to the stars and closed her eyes, her ship finally making contact with the atmosphere, and when the back of it began to crackle and burn, she listened as the sounds of the sparking and ripping away of her outer hull went dull and silent to her own memories, to all the words she'd read in the stories from Earth, to a few from her own culture, to the words in her father's letter, to the imagination of her mother's voice. She listened to the stars and swore that she could hear Ecklestein's voice among them, telling her to let go of her hatred, to let go of her sadness, to simply let go.

Down on Jalan, it was a calm evening in the capital city of Gemma, where a human family was resting in a large park with friends near an ancient Rijoran temple at sunset. The young children galloped across the green grasses, tagging each other and yelling the impassioned screams children couldn't help but yell, during what the aged would probably view as trivial circumstances.

A man in his early forties lay comfortably against a large tree root, under an old and well-knotted round-leafed tree, lazily sipping on wine, serenely gazing up at the red horizon, peeking up at the first few stars in the sky—the most luminous in their galactic neighborhood. A similarly aged man walked up to him with a drink in his hand, noticing him in a daze, and kicked some dirt on him.

"Chase," he said, surprised. "What are you doing?"

"Sabotaging your wine, Aaron," the man replied, kicking more dirt on him.

"You know, you can get as much dirt in this wine as you want," Aaron said with a grin, "'cause this stuff's local: It _came_ from dirt."

They both chuckled, and Chase took a seat on the exposed root.

"What were you thinking about?" Chase asked. "You looked pretty locked in."

"Yeah," Aaron responded. "watching the kids play with some wine in my belly always gets me thinking about life, ya know?"

Chase nodded.

"Just about how fast time goes," Aaron continued. "The uncontrollable swirl down the toilet of our existence."

Chase looked up at the sky and sipped his wine, stopping to taste it while he looked down into his cup. "I think you're drunk, bud."

They chuckled again.

"Yeah maybe," Aaron said. "But one thing you can't deny is how awesome the horizon is at sunset, no matter what planet you're on."

Chase lifted his cup towards Aaron's, and Aaron tapped it with his own without looking.

"Are you," Chase said, "getting inspiration for another painting?"

"I'm _always_ getting inspiration, Chase," Aaron replied. "I just don't always have the opportunity to put it somewhere."

They sat for a moment until they both realized that their children had fallen silent somewhere behind them on the hill. They looked back to see them standing still, staring up at the sky, and they walked out of the cover of the tree to see what they were staring at.

Two small streaks of flaming debris, high up in the atmosphere, travelled slowly across the sky, with their smoke trails expanding behind them, like someone had dragged an ink brush through water. A woman strolled along and quietly grabbed Chase's hand and arm, and joined them in viewing the spectacle.

"What is it, Chay?" she asked.

"I don't know," Chase replied. "Meteors?" He looked over at Aaron and noticed his eyes squinted in focus at the streaks, his lips tightened, his eyebrows furrowed.

"Yeah," Aaron finally said. "Meteors."

Chase looked back at his wife and she gazed back up in wonder, and when he looked back at Aaron he noticed that his eyes had welled up, and his free hand was balled up tight in a fist.

Aaron knew what he was looking at: the shapes and streaks; the sequential bursts of flames from the heat of the debris reacting with ship parts; the debris itself breaking up into smaller pieces and burning up in arbitrary directions. He inhaled deeply as his lungs shook from emotion; he exhaled audibly, looking down at the reflections of the sky in his wine and brought it up to his lips.

Before he could take a sip, he felt a nudge to his side, and noticed Chase eyeing him with a look of understanding, nodding with his cup raised. Aaron looked down at Chase's raised cup and tapped it with his own, and they both took a sip with their faces towards the stars.

Aaron then knelt down next to his daughter and hugged her close.

"What are those, daddy?"

"Meteors, honey," he answered.

"They're _beautiful,_ " she said.

The words transported Aaron Fring back 12 years to a night where he had felt the effects of his chronic sickness waning, and had decided to walk the hills around his med-station during the final approach of Corath'Thal and his fleet. That night, Aaron witnessed them as they lowered their thermal shields, entering the atmosphere of their beloved homeworld amidst flame and destruction, honoring their fallen brothers and sisters from that war and the previous, in a final, fiery statement to the galaxy and everyone in it that they, Corath'Thal and his men, had made it back to their world, and they chose death in the atmosphere of the world that would forever be their home, over surrendering to the people who took it from them. The ultimate tragedy of the tevarin fleet reached out across the world to a man who felt the pain of his enemy, where these unnecessary deaths haunted him, and he captured that moment in a painting to show others a glimpse of it. That empathy was his connection to all life and now he felt it again, witnessing a pair of ships that had tumbled through their stories to a violent end before him, before his family, and before his daughter, who, only as an innocent, could state something so tragically true like she did.

His stomach tightened, catching an involuntary sniff as tears streamed down his face, and he hugged his daughter tighter as they stared at the sky.

" _Yes they are._ "


	9. INFO

Welcome to The Scrapper. Thanks for stopping by!

Any terms and worlds can be searched with Google plus "star citizen."

Any stars or planets mentioned can be viewed in the very nifty ARK Starmap on the Star Citizen website. Search "ARK Starmap" and it should be the first thing that comes up.

Thanks again, and feedback—or mere viewing—is greatly appreciated!


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